use a fork—a straw is good,

or spoon-fed. Before we hang up,

I say, I am alone here,

and I know there are folks there now, so I can say

I love you so much, and you can just say

Goodbye. Soon! he says, and I say

Yes, laughing, as lovers may laugh.

O.K., see ya! he says, and I say,

See ya! laughing, my arteries seeding with

oxygen of laughter like blown

dandelion seeds—the luck of true love!

The radiance of preference, mutual and equal.

Three Views of Him Asleep, His Final Days

One was through the wooden-framed doorway

of the guest room—I was resting on an old,

heavy, oak, Stickley, bed, my

nape held up by the footboard cross-piece—

now I look back, I think I was like

a present, in its box, he would wake soon

and call my name and I’d emerge, his girl

from inside a cake. The head of his hospice

bed was hummed up, I saw the curve of his

great, domed forehead, creamy

cancer color, like a five-night moon

setting, points down, below it the

dark, tear-drop shape of his nostrils, and, be-

low them, his mouth open

in sleep, his head framed in the wild

silver and black which started to come back

in when the chemo was stopped, not round but

ellipsis ripples which will keep growing

when he’s bedded down in the unending night

in which we believe he will not be lonely.

Two was when the long bristles of the

coarse coat of his beard were level with my

eyes, he on his back asleep

in the bed on wheels, I on my side,

fitted to him between the laid-low

mountain of his body and the guard-rail at my back—

cradle bars, training-bed,

training grave. Three was later,

he at my left, the fire dying

to my right, me beneath the hot

coal-color parchment of the iron lamp,

reading as he slept, his golden animal

familiar, Witch Hazel, not entirely

gone from the living room yet. The wood

stove, the good dog, the flexible

bed with its branches—a tree I know well

how to climb—

and the fine, worn man almost hori-

zontal a couple of feet above

the layers of carpets, the home-hewn floor,

the cellar ceiling, yards above

the basement porch, another yard

above the complex dirt of the earth,

resting on its stone and iron,

each of us a companion, as he

does his dying, the last hard work of his life.

The Preparing

Only after the years, months, of our

talks about what dying is—

he felt no one could meet his eyes

when they knew he would die, soon (Shhh,

no one but I)—

only after he had died, did I see I’d been

all my life, preparing to help him—as a

child I had recited it weekly,

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow

of death, thou art with me—fuck thy rod and thy

staff—Carl who had got in a fight