ICU

I peel adhesive tape from your eyelids.
There’s the infinite stare in
a room which offers no sense
of health, no comfort as I move close,
your breath never so
bad as when man-made.
Tears fill your eyes
(though they are mine)
quenching their thirst
dried out by the air you can’t blink away.
I blink them for you, manually,
though a broken heart wonders
what manual was written to learn this.
I stick the tape to the bed rails,
and press your hand, though for naught,
like flicking a switch when the power’s out.
I hold you wanting you to hold me
and tell me that it’s not my fault,
but there is only the slow
click-click of your breath,
and the gentle beeping of your heart,
paddle-shaped burns cross your breasts.
I can’t measure the distance
between my skin and you
even though we’re touching.
Tomorrow it shall be my choice
to tell them that you should be
allowed to go home, to let you
become as cold as your hands,
as hard and cold as the fingernails
you’d chew, Mom saying “stop that!”
when we’d watch TV,
children huddled together on the couch.
I huddle here now,
with other screens flashing and buzzing,
and I know that I shall leave here,
without you, no matter what I do.

I’ll tell the nurse about the tape,
and ask her to cover my eyes before I go.

©Bill Gnade 2000, 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

This poem is associated with this essay on death and dying.

The Temperature Of Things

Beneath these delicate, ice-scarred branches
you raise weeping, tearless eyes in doubt
sun-ward where the autumn chill won’t reach.
The band ringing your finger is warmer than his
now that he’s a cold-blooded thing deep
like a turtle in the mud of a December pond.
You know he is in a shell too, the carapace
you bought the other shock-sodden day
when he was a little bit warmer than time allows now.
You think he’s warm there, still, not white like the ashes
fallen from your lip-stained cigarette, once a flame
all but smoked out between trembling fingers.
You exhale over those red, red lips, warm rosy breath,
a bit smoky, which won’t warm his comely cheek
though you think he may be home, waiting,
displaced, returned from an unplanned trip with
bouquets and postcards from heaven-gilt cities.
You’ve not seen this place before, in this light,
slanted shadows, heatless, resting on their backs.
You doubt the cold, the cold which becomes him,
the temperature of mere things: like the flowers,
the wind-tossed robe and the book of prayer,
the dirt tracing your favorite shoes and the
hardly hidden spades leaning against
that leafless tree with lichen-clad trunk.
Turning your searching, sorrowed face away from
those cold insistent shadows lying there far too long
you make your own departure certain,
like the chill-touch of those nearby headstones.

©Bill Gnade 1997, 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

This poem is associated with this essay on death and dying.

Cannon In Ursa Major

We were fifth graders
romping home from school
on a perfect September day
when we stopped
at Phelans’ house with
Paul and Michael
their eldest boys
two of eight children
named for saints.
Mrs. Phelan
(St. Catherine, I believe)
announced
that the family car
had been stolen
an hour before our arrival
and the police
come and gone
were statewide looking
for two daring perpetrators
who made off
with the failing
Ford Galaxy
muted gold
crumbs on vinyl seats.
Wildly excited by this
improbable disturbance
in Dublin’s
coveted solace
we burst into the yard
eager for clues.
Instantly we caught sight
of car tracks
in grass
in the backyard
and a broken rope
frayed at one end
limply connected
to the house
at the other.
St. Paul shouted,
“They must have cut
the clothesline before
they took the car!”
With Sherlock Holmes' tenacity
we followed the car-prints
as they led down
a sloping lawn toward
the overgrown meadow
at the far edge of the lot.
Without a word
we were off
sprinting
intent on
catching crooks
who had the misfortune
of driving a stolen car
into brambles
which would be
no smart get-away.
Our hopes for a speedy arrest
were soon dashed
so too our quest for reward
when the tracks
were lost and the car
undiscovered,
sleuths thwarted
in making headlines.
“Look!” yelled St. Michael.
“That way!” chimed St. Mary.
They spotted our egregious error:
we had been too hasty.
The car had not
continued straight;
its tracks made a slippery
wheel-spinning arc
through the yard.
It had not merely rolled
through a meadow
the victim of careless
gear engagement
mere neutrality
it had peeled out
of the drive
willfully;
it had raced across the lawn
ripped down the clothesline
fish-tailed in panic
around blind bushes
and scrub trees
(the only witnesses)
and zoomed back
up the drive
burning rubber
due west toward
freedom.
There was a jealous silence:
we all wanted to fish-tail.

Later
the bad guys would be caught
near Vermont
two fugitives with a gun
(a hand-cannon, as dad called it)
the car returned
no worse
though surely charmed
in our eyes.
For days and days
we’d sit in that parked
car and recall
dashing youth
hunting for clues
just out of reach
as a police car
lights ablaze
sirens calling
chases two young men
fleeing across
tempestuous stars
shooting comets
laughing
fish-tailing
in a stolen Galaxy.

©Bill Gnade 1998/2006 - All Rights Reserved.

Where two or more are gathered

Whisper like the twilight on the steps
between Harlow’s Pub and the rest of all
that does not matter

Enter and fingertip the blessed font,
christen your brow with a wash of greetings
holier than mere chatter

Pour a pint over the rim of the chasm
between laughter and the rest of all
that is simple to forget

Linger over bawdy conversation and
love’s perennial promises of kisses that
none could ever regret

Hear poet and player in shadow puppet
story and song in stringed rhythm
plucked without neglect

of days hardly spent and nights’ drumbeats
in vibrant ears, spirits tethered by
the tenuous ring of glass and the deep
longing for music without time

Dream against the daymares that steal
the moments of clarity and strength,
letting heresies loose, embrace the real
in gratitude for each life’s length

and praise the baptismal ale
at the pale end of day


©Bill Gnade
January 2003

Jane's Fingers

If there is a way for him to see
then he sees you cross yourself
below the melody of the organ
and above the silence of the crypt

I close my eyes and see the December
in your smile
I reach to feel Easter in your
smooth reassuring skin

As you cross the aisle looking over your
shoulder flirting with my flaccid hope
of a truly lived love, and a truly
loved life in the simplicity of a snow
flake in December and the April
daffodils as complex as love allows

He sees you cross yourself and kneel
to receive the death of that which is eternal
he sees you surrender to paradox
while the rest of the world settles
for the safe certainty offered by
certain fictions
and the clarity of some cynical truth
explaining so little yet manageable
like the moon in the utterly confounding sky
so clear, illuminating so little

When you climb a hill or lie on a beach
winging in the valley wind or ebbing
with the metered tides, drawing the sun and
surf toward your own gravity

in the union of prayer and faith
crossing the gulf, he sees you
stretch from wing tip to wing tip
from wrist to wrist, aloft with
a certainty only he can see,
and I can only dream
kneeling beside you, eyes closed
legs still touching the questioned earth

©Bill Gnade 2004/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

Isabella's feet

are easily within reach
of her wordless mouth
happy-quiet in her travel seat
on the knee-swept floor of
this comely church, washed in
all colors, no shape or shadow
in her unblinking wonder at the
unnouned, unverbed world

her face brushed wet
with blue, yellow
redblush sunspots,
a breathing chiaroscuro in Rembrandt pleasure
washing her own feet
of dust she has not yet walked through
in stained glass lightspill she has not yet read
shaken by low tones of the
organ she has not yet heard

©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes -- All Rights Reserved.

The Force Of One: Poke And Prod Prose To The Bone

[This post is an addendum to Contratimes Writing Tip #2. What follows was originally written in 2002 for a writing course I led at a small private high school. Having assigned to the senior class the task of writing an essay where only one-syllable words must be used from start to finish, I felt it behooved me to model good form. "The Sound of One" and "To Love The Sky When It Rains", the former written as a sort of rubric and the latter penned for the sheer fun of it, could be models for aspiring writers everywhere. Both pieces are offered here as an example of how powerfully one can write when limiting oneself to small words; as such, they are full of whimsy, I believe, and hence are really prose poems (another reason why they are posted here). I want to thank master teacher and "verbifore" Richard Lederer (he used to teach at the prestigious St. Paul's School in Concord, NH) for first offering this challenge to me when I attended a New Hampshire Press Association awards banquet. His challenge changed my literary life, literally. I hope it will change yours, too. What fun!]

I. The Sound of One

Oh, to write and speak with one sound, clear, pure, bright, quick to the point, not with waste of word, thought or ink. That's the bliss of speech and pen: to tell one's tale or boast of truth in the speed of words that with just one sound lend so much to those who hear; who search for the real. That's the deal!

What is left for a man if he must sift through the stuff of wit that is not one whit wit? Must he shop cheap stores for a truth stripped of the weight of too much said? Can he find a gem that gleams, not one dulled by words made to say more than what is meant?

Think of the grand size of all that is small: truth, love, joy, faith, God! Why bring more than you need on your trip to truth?

Love the loss of more than you need, and you will find that you need less than you love.

II. To Love The Sky When It Rains

I want to hold the rain in the palm of my hand; I want to hold all of the sky: the clouds, the wind, and the deep blue that comes too late. Is there no gift of grace in this dream, this wish to keep what can't be held too close to the heart?

Hear, oh soul, hear the drum of rain on the slick roofs; feel the tap of rain on brim of hat; taste the rains that quench old thirst. Take the cup's clear drink borne on wings of wind and breeze, light and cool. Is rain not made of joy?

In dark times I try to blind my eyes to all that is true. I turn my back on what is good and just, fair and kind. There are days I choose to hate the heat of sun, when I claim that I am my own, lone and strong. But in the dark, fear comes in the knock on the door. In days of hate, fear comes in a kind word or warm laugh, and then I am not so bold to think that I can be hard to the joy that taps on the roof of my soul; that taps on the hold which is my frail heart.

Oh, sweet Faith, think of the Man who is more than man, who made the rain but can't hold what He wrought, for rain falls soft through holes sin spiked through the palms of His hands. He holds the sky and storms and suns, and drops of rain, no doubt, but rain still pours through, rain which lands with the beat of a small drum; like the sound of a light knock on the door, or the slow splash of blood at the foot of a cross.

©Bill Gnade April 15, 2002/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

Technorati tags: Writing Tips, Richard Lederer

I See Too Little Too Much

I see a shade on the window of the world,
and it is drawn

I see a plow in the fertile skin of the earth
and it is still

I see a Bible on the pulpit of peace and it is not
earmarked anywhere, for anything

I see a novel in the corner, unpublished, unread
an undreamt dream

which should be its title

I see a nurse on the floor in the hall
and everyone is buzzing

I see a dumpster full of truths, and a
crow picking one over

I see a group of monkeys hammering away at
pieces of granite and marble, and I see that they have written
on headstones everything ever written in The New York Times
another cosmological argument for the tyranny of nothing

I see a child walking down the sidewalk and
there are no crossing guards or warning lights, no signs
saying Don’t Walk or Go Back or Don’t Believe a
Word They Tell You

And I hear the trees screaming in the woodstove
and the cow moaning behind my freezer door

I see eviction notices posted over the doors
of bluebird houses, and lawnmower
tracks through the lilies of the field where there
is toil and vortex spin

And I see a yacht sinking on a golf green
or the fate of nations falling into a cup
with one wicked putt

I hear a poet in a café who has given up
words, and words that have given up meaning
and histories that are just Kuhnian paradigms
and there is nothing like a Platonic form

And suddenly there is a dawn I see with my eyes closed and a dusk I can
hear in a shock wave

And I see Jesus moving in a tomb and a Buddha that is skinny
and a Mohammed that never touched a sword
and that if the tomb is not empty there is nothing
that will stop the Adam-splitting begun in the
chambers of the bomb once it falls
splitting the very stars from my vision

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

Hearings from the House

Sir, you have testified that
we must alleviate the suffering
of a woman you just said cannot suffer.

Sir, you have just said that
she was at 26 so sick
that she had a heart
attack, and yet,
after 15 years, the only way
this sickly woman will now die is to kill her.

In fact, sir, you’ll note that she is so frail, as
you say
12 days of starvation and dehydration
have not killed her. Healthy people
die sooner.

Sir, you have further testified
that she won’t suffer
yet you have this week given
her morphine
twice
for the pain you have sworn
she cannot feel.
If in dying she does not suffer
how then does she in living?

Or is it you who suffers?
Are you the one who needs
relief?

This is not a story about life.
It’s one of love.
The love of parents for their child.
The honor they give her by feeding her;
by trying to rescue her; to give her life
meaning, purpose, interest. Perhaps she
is oblivious. But who is harmed, if she is
in fact unconscious?
(Or to hell with their Catholic compassion?)

It is not a story about a husband who loves his wife
or her right to die. For we do not
know her wish; we only know his, which
took him years to tell us, and is different
than when all this began.
His wish is that she must die,
so he can get on with his life with
some other woman.

She would want that.
He says.

©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

Related essays (at Contratimes): A Foolish Consistency, A Central (Yet Not Comedic) Irony

Related links: Terri Schiavo: A Life That Mattered And Still Matters