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Jude Goodwin
The
Green Room
1.
This hour is a wedge
imbedded in the chest of night,
the deep night when all the rugs go soft
and blankets mound like children
murmuring sweet vows, sweet
promises. This hour is a spade
digging in the mudflats,
chasing clam spouts, cracking
shells, spreading the meat
like any crazy bird
lifting her wide feet from the skin
of the sea. This hour is the prow
of a tin ship, dusty, pointed north;
a shard of common quartz
in a velvet bag. This
hour is a breath,
then sixty counts
before the next,
in a green room
where everyone waits.
2.
In the green room
my father is dying.
Somewhere at the end
of a long hollow tube
we signed his walking papers
and the doctors have gone home.
Its not like TV.
There is no blinking light,
no beep - just the usual
sticky city rain,
the voiceless family
circle, and one white tube
above his bed.
3.
An in breath is complicated.
The spark needs to make its way
from nerve to nerve
down willing pathways
to heart and lung and there
the cells must rally,
pull together, suck those air molecules,
suck and suck.
The out is nothing,
just gravity
and the heft of an old man's life.
Between the two,
the in and the out,
is a deep wet ticking,
and the lower jaw
flapping slightly like a vent.
The body is a furnace dark
in a concrete basement -
huge, menacing,
ticking as it cools,
that vent swinging and swinging.
Suddenly
it all starts up again.
How long? We ask.
"Count" the nurse advises
"Count between breaths."
So we count.
4.
This is how it is:
we hope to count forever.
round I, poem 13
(April
13)
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| Jude Goodwin (Squamish, BC Canada),
illustrator, web design. A new poet, Jude's poems have been published
online at Eclectica, Wicked Alice,
HISS, and the Guardian
Poetry Workshop. Jude is an editor for WebdelSol's Poetry Forum:
the Writers Block. Website: goodwinstudios.com |
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