
Mark McNease
You called out my name
and fell, a thud sounding
down the hall. That’s what I recall.
A moment. A pained expression.
An outcry.
I have cried out since when possible,
stone-faced, taking it on the chin.
Your good boy, referring to you
as My dead mother when telling a story.
A sister’s call came
on an otherwise repetitive day,
working away, as we work our lives
away, telling me results had come back.
Two round circles in the left lung
keeping each other company,
a cancerous, prospering community
of cells gone mad, fruitful and multiplying.
I dropped the phone and cried.
This was a well-worn path, I had a map.
Time would accelerate.
The life expectancy offered would be
on the mark, and I wanted to do it right
this time, to have nothing left to haunt me
with what I hadn’t done or said.
I asked if I should come home.
You said maybe later, “You know,
when the time comes.” But the time
had come, becoming now with that call.
Waiting was too risky, the morphine was
just around the corner and I knew
when we turned it you would be gone.
It was a long awful summer.
I listened through the wall
in the blue bedroom, Father talking
as if you could help it, furious, why
were you doing this to him?
Incoherent conversation
broken by long silence at the dinner table,
you staring into nothingness, unable to swallow.
Father telling anecdotes about the neighbor
who had a lung transplant, goddamn the doctors
for saying you wouldn’t live through it,
they must be wrong, young and uncaring.
Back and forth from New York
knowing what was coming, I quit
my job, life was so short, I had
the evidence, dreams expired with time.
Autumn and your 50th anniversary, the last
good night you had, pretty and poised.
And from there a quick good-bye.
You’d done your utmost, you’d held on.
Christmas morning, comatose, your breathing
labored, and I said, She won’t last long.
I knew, I was familiar with a last day.
Dinner that evening, my sister coming
to the table as we finished, saying
it was over. Dead mother, stiff, sunken
between the bedrails, you’d gone.
Goddamn it, I thought, late again.
I never saw the last breath, I only guessed
you’d left with a sigh and in the time it took
to hurry to the bedroom you’d flown far away,
leaving behind snapshots and a son.
Mark McNease
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