True, But Still,

True, But Still,

it wasn’t a Monday that year you died

but a Tuesday and it was almost

a Wednesday and then

one more day and it would’ve been

Thanksgiving.  It was Monday, the day

before you died, when you turned

sixty and you were as you’d come in

all those years before: sick

barely breathing, hustled to

the sunk indignity of dull

lights and a bevy of on call
nurses who knew all of what was good

what was good for you and did none of it.  Still

a month or more from being just barely

ok, you couldn’t wait and you wanted

out and you wanted a particular

out you thought people, finally, might

stick around for.  And as soon

as you were made

comfortable the room tipped, almost

everyone spilled out, they couldn’t

hang on.  I'm Remembering ‘Out, Out,” by

Robert Frost right, how the boy

was doing a man’s job cutting

wood and his sister called out to him

‘supper’?  How he was distracted

and the saw sawed off

almost all of his hand?  Remember

how the doctors came and he

weak as he was didn’t want them

to cut it off because listen, a Hand!

how could he work without

a hand?  But the ether was his first

real sleep ever and maybe it was

accidental but he slipped out

into its pure and stunning buoyancy

and balked just once, just for show

because you know

sister was watching and those doctors…

Well, that’s the line everyone

empties out on: because they were not

the one dead they've turned

to their affairs.  By the time you were ready

to leave with dignity and this time

for forever you were percolating

you were drawing up

something that was the very last

of something and I felt you give out and be

no more.  Later on I’d imagine

the girl out of line after Frost is done

with her, how she washes her brother

and lays him in a grave.  Ten years on

maybe she still visits him, she makes

a big deal of it to the woods where he’s always

with the oak and the ash and the baby

maples.  She looks up into

their canopies and maybe, knocked

loose by the sheer regularity death
anniversaries have, she hears him

laughing, pulling a chord to shut the machine

down not giving it another thought.

She thinks this to the stone

in front of her, to the body of him

in the ground under it, to the weight

of it in her memory, his dying, his still

letting go his still warm fingers on his still

attached hand saying stay, stay

there’s still enough time to change

your mind.