I.C.U.

I stare at your mouth,
broken open for
some dark gathering,
open for business
serving only one question,
as your chest scrapes
more lung
to feed a heart gone hungry,
my eyes check the measure
of mortality’s true hand
carving through a parchment weary,
the jut and claw of
tendons spreading
liver spots and stubble
on a neck built

for what?

The hospital gown has
slipped off your shoulder,
and the bloodless skin beneath
strikes me as an innocence taken,
not given,
it’s too much for me to see,
I, your granddaughter,
once held on your good knee,
that blood flows down to me,
I’ve taken it,
hand over hand,
we’ve traced the genes
along the rope,
given them names,
wrapped meaning like covers
around leather-bound books
titled Harmon Genealogy,
when they’re all but
the dust of memory

You’re 94,
and that should make
it all right,
but somehow I still can’t
wrap my brain around it

And the heart monitor
goes blip-blip
around the countdown clock
inside my head
while nurses chatter
over the hospital stink
about premature thunder,
(drip drip goes the rain
outside, where people
drive cars instead of sleep,
I wonder if you dream),
and the nurses have moved on
to talk of broken parts,
and you once owned a
tool company,
I know this
I remember

When I was on the
other side of the
dark equation

You rolled them down
an assembly line,
counting the widgets,
counting nickels and dimes,
which you’d someday show me
in that little coin holder
that puckered like
my pink little mouth
every time you slid
it out
to buy me a smile
or to entertain
as we waited for
some thing that
probably came

And your mouth isn’t smiling now

But you’re 94!
And that should make
it all right,
it really ought,
but somehow I still can’t
wrap my brain around it,
and I probably won’t
until I’m the one with
the tube up my nose,
and I just can’t stare around it
anymore

Where is that line
separating wet and dry,
near and far,
dead from alive?
I’ve never been good
at believing in the
black and white
that often seemed
to structure your life,
I always wanted to
squeeze in some rainbows
somewhere in the
space between,
and you were all right
with that

If only I had let you in

But none of our tools
is good enough now,
my eyes see what is
right in front of me,
they drill down because
you do not look at me,
and that thinnest of
red lines lives not on
a monitor,
but somewhere
in that dark cavity
stretched for deep sleep,
and it is so thin,
but tight,
that nothing can sit on it,
nor wriggle through it,
not my fear,
my sadness,
this moment,
the rain

not even color
or poetry

My Granddad with his 

great-granddaughter