A Higher Power

for V.

Every Sunday, he tells us Rita MacNeil

appears beside his bed

to hum him to sleep. Gently she

rubs his sore feet. Blind from birth,

he has never seen her specials,

but he replays every note

for us in black and white.

We cannot believe in her nightly

visitations, but three days

after Rita whispers

You’ll meet me soon,

he dies with a smile on his lips.

THE EMPIRE

to exterminate

to expel

exterminare

armenians led to the desert

to die

100 years ago   now

no one came     no one stopped

the genocide    1.5 million tortured

raped starved   finally to rest

in their blood and excrement        waiting

on death       asking

why?

it was a quiet little genocide

one hundred years to remember

one hundred years to forgot

Held

The gum-smacking receptionist who let it slip

that the embryo in my ultrasound was

four weeks old when those pee sticks

have been positive for eight.

The Asian nurse who showed me to my bed,

saying, Not boy or girl. Decomposing.

The nervous intern who, missing the vein, flooded

my right elbow with labour-inducing fluid,

giving rise to swollen flesh

that never reached my belly. 

The anesthetic dream 

of my baby as a blonde boy

climbing clouds shaped like

human arms.

Calibrations

We need a machine
to tell us if you love me
as much as I love you.

To calculate
what could go wrong
and when
and maybe even why.

So I can anticipate
regulate
mitigate
brace myself
for your inevitable departure.

===

Will comment on others' posts this weekend!

Episode

Rain in the background of '70s sci-fi on TV.
It's dark. The evil scientist has our heroes
in a trap. His cave is a labyrinth. The only possible
direction is further in. Curved walls studded
with fragments of mirror, polished corundum,
agate, jasper. Flashes of jagged reflection,
an optical trick. Just off the screen,
out the window, something flickers. When I turn,
it's gone. This happens again. Meanwhile, our heroes
have a plan. They'll use the power of thought
to bend reality, the only way to escape
the twist of the villain's mind. I face the window.
Sooner or later that flicker will come again.
At the last desperate moment, our heroes
will win. If I watch long enough I'll find out
where the light is coming from.

[This is a revision of one I posted here a couple of years ago-- just in case it looks familiar to anyone.]

maman

you are leaving us
this I know
your eyes I see, altostrati,
cover the Perseid intellect
that is, was, you.

your word-tangy tongue is gone,
slinger of a billion firecracker faux-pas,
insults, misfire compliments
"oh you look so fat and brown"
your fuse switches never quite turned on.

the year before my black lab died
her eyes turned to milk
her atomic bark turned mutish
and I knew it was time
when she could no longer stand up.

now you my mother are confined,
a wheelchair, "a seat belt" (lie
lie, they are strapping you in)
because the fiendish yogi, fitness nut
decades before namaste was a brand
can no longer be trusted to walk without

the fall. the fall last Fall
snapped your humerus, your brain in two
you could not eat, drink, read (read!
you of a billion bedside books)
nor speak, nor even weep

and I lay awake all night with you
held your hand while you hallucinated
three men (your brothers? two of them dead)
asking you to come with them. No!
Don't go. Don't go. Don't. Go.
I hope I said. But now, o my
beloved star of the west. I don't know.

We leave with a label

Something’s wrong:
my kid is always happy!

When the ice cream slipped
off his cone, he said, “Oh well,
Next time.” He laughs at time
outs, grins at injury.

Outside the one-
way mirror: “Dr. Aspie,”
the psychiatrist who confirms
suspicions.

I reach for
my son, but this book has
no words. I fight
to describe the pictures
with enough emotion to hold
him beside me. To prove
to the other side
of the glass that
I’m not the reason
we are here.

The psychiatrist enters
and asks him to name
his best friend, his favourite food
on earth. My son orbits
our chairs in a helicopter
of words and giggles:

All propulsion
systems at maximum!
 
He always    
this oblivious? Dr. Aspie
wants to know. He turns to me
and says Welcome
to Aspergers.

Same

You are approached by a big bird, emerald and gold,  

perched on the right shoulder of a guy on a bike.

Last summer the same guy walked past you with

the same bright bird on the same shoulder. You assume

the same string connects bird leg and human finger.

The name, you also assume, remains the same:

Yellow-Headed-Amazon from Guatemala or Belize.

As far from home as last year. As rigidly composed.

Things re-occur: waking and sleeping, seedtime and harvest,

rain and snow. You are walking a path you’ve walked before.

As always, questions pop up: Where did the guy get the bike?

When the string breaks will the beautiful bird fly home?

Parent support group

We slouch in plush seats and sigh.

We rise to surround her shoulders and pray

the cancer goes.

I’ve never seen my boy seizure like

the dad on my right. Never seen my girl 

through open heart surgery like the mom

across the table.

We laugh in the face of absent

resource teachers. We clasp blue 

hands around each 

mismatched mug. 

We pass the chocolate.