On Last Breaths

Her Bedroom:
Rebecca Nurse House

On Last Breaths

…the world

learns

the sound of its

own name

by dropping its

fearful weight

on us,

out of the dark…

so we can know the full

terror

of that love…

                                David Whyte

                                The Sound of the Wild

The poet I’m reading now tells me Henry

Ford believed the soul

was in the breath and so

he captured his friend’s last

one in a glass

and stopped it

like a bottle of wine.  I have to say I’d pay

to see that

supposed invisible breath of Thomas

Edison, glass behind glass,

and really what I’d be looking at

is my own stoppered belief

about it all

because really what is there

to see?  As much really and as deep

as what there is

to think about it, I mean, I know

last breaths myself, I have one

everyone has one right? and I have

another one, too:

my mother’s

who suffered up out of her gut-

teral gutter, who was lifted 

by the tenderest most invisible hands and only had to part

her lips.  And I breathed it in:

sweet, a hint

of lip balm that I can’t bear the fragrance of

today, even if it means it will heal

me, will make every sore invisible,

the ones at my most desperate stress

that stretch and bulge

and weep and bleed

for nearly two weeks.  Healing is

guaranteed.  But I must be

like lepers

exposed I must ring my bell I must see

each eye look at me

look at my mouth

glaze with pity or doubt or who knows what

while it bounces there

while I’m ashamed at every hot tingle

while my breath, a fever,

chaps the rest of my lips, cracks them bloody

and I slather

other ointments and waxes while I exhale

out my nose and it all goes

hot and alone

down to my closed mouth.

I’m sad

Edison’s breath is trapped

and can’t even mingle, I mean,

there’s a scrap, really,

of my mother’s in me and the rest

went God help us to my sister

who bent so close to her face

my mother was blotted out of me,

eclipsed.  She’d breathed

short puffs for so long, so yes ok

maybe there is a piece of me that would’ve put

a little glass tube under her lip

to capture her.  And stopped it.  And pocketed it.

And maybe brought it home to, to,

-- to what?

to shove in a drawer by my bed? Frame

the way expensive certificates are framed: double walled

so nothing touches

the glass?  Admit it: what’s really in there

is the air all the way back

to God, because he breathed,

didn’t he?

on Adam, right? and some

molecule or two must’ve  escaped

unless it was lip to lip

under pressure, in which case I think Adam

would’ve exploded, I mean, come on, it’s God

we’re talking about here.

I think maybe instead of her breath

I would’ve liked a word

but by the time my mother died

she was through and through with tubes—

her throat was choked as the creek

in deep winter: a pause and a falter of thick.

I don’t know what thick

but yesterday I saw the yellowed,

veiny maybe with December blow-
downs, mass on top of the water

and it’s just past Christmas,

and it reminded me of the fat

on the edges of raw beef, prime rib

at room temperature—yellowed,

almost rancid.  And that’s

a lot to get through.  Sound

I mean.  And by the time it rises up

it’s not breath or music anymore,

it’s a snore, like what I heard

the other day, a deeply erotic longing

I felt shy to listen to but also

blessed because one: she was content,

this other woman, and two she was

alive!  She was satisfied.  Maybe I want that

when I die, but I want it while I’m living

too, while it can’t be trapped

and hoarded,

while I can appreciate every moan

of it working and that fat I see

along the deep into December river

is something that helps me and my partner

glide and rid and finally, still alive,

cry this is the last this is the last!

and keep on keeping on, sounding and crying

and breathing out and in groaning,

keeping it, giving it, alive.