or teaching neighborhood kids the value

of a left hook to the ribs, an uppercut to the jaw?

Everybody dies. John Garfield, who played Charlie

and was notorious in Hollywood

for screwing all the starlets, died

in a hotel room at thirty-nine. My old father,

after a year of lying paralyzed

in a nursing home, finally died, allowing my mother

the relative relief of widowhood. Maybe Charlie

lived long enough to go the same way,

all those blows to the head

coming home to roost, while his true love

sat beside the bed, holding his useless hands

in hers. On the TV there’d be some forties movie

playing like a black-and-white memory,

full of torch songs and champagne

and money swirling down the screen

like rainwater down a drain. That night after the movie

a group of us dined on clams and salmon

and drank martinis in a noisy restaurant

whose neon sign might have read

Everybody Dies, since all of us would;

the waiters in their striped French T-shirts might even

have been there to ferry across to the other world anyone who did.

But it wasn’t our time. We emerged intact

into an alley the rain was lacquering with a sheen

that seemed unreal, a movie set rain

orchestrated with levers and machinery

to suffuse the scene with the right proportion of melancholy

as we all stood a few minutes under a flickering light,

reluctant to part, the women buttoning their coats,

the men lowering the brims of their fedoras,

everybody finally dispersing into the night.

February 14

FEBRUARY 14

This is a valentine for the surgeons

ligating the portal veins and hepatic artery,

placing vascular clamps on the vena cava

as my brother receives a new liver.

And a valentine for each nurse;

though I don’t know how many there are

leaning over him in their gauze masks,

I’m sure I have enough—as many hearts

as it takes, as much embarrassing sentiment

as anyone needs. One heart

for the sutures, one for the instruments

I don’t know the names of,

and the monitors and lights,

and the gloves slippery with his blood

as the long hours pass,

as a T-tube is placed to drain the bile.

And one heart for the donor,

who never met my brother

but who understood the body as gift

and did not want to bury or burn that gift.

For that man, I can’t imagine how

one heart could suffice. But I offer it.

While my brother lies sedated,

opened from sternum to groin,

I think of a dead man, being remembered

by others in their sorrow, and I offer him

these words of praise and gratitude,

oh beloved whom we did not know.

And Then I Woke Up

AND THEN I WOKE UP

What a relief to discover

that the doctor in my dream

did not exist, that his voice on the phone

and even the phone itself

were only figments, neural parcels