My Hand Collection
Arranged around the lamp’s mercury glass globe,
They reach out for or defend against
The attention that wood or bronze or resin
Shakily command at this late stage
Of reproduction. After all, none is like
My own one of a kind, its rigging
Of creases, its scuffed half-moons and bitten nails,
Its quivering index and moiré
Pattern of skin loosely draped over the bones—
Liver spots carelessly spilled on it,
Along with whatever dings or oily stains
The insincere handshake and backslap,
The dog’s tongue or jock’s package have left behind.
Those on this table are innocent.
The pair unscrewed from a side chapel’s martyr
Still holding crazed flakes of their own thumbs,
The pharaoh’s fist implacably denying
The idea there are more gods than one,
A factory glove mold, the madam’s ring holder,
A mannequin’s milk-white come-hither,
The miniature ecstatic’s stigmata,
Someone’s smartly cuffed, celluloid brooch,
A Buddha’s gilded fingertips joined and poised,
Like a conductor’s, at last to re-
lease the final, tremulous, resolving chord—
Each frozen in a single gesture,
Pleading, threatening, clinging, shielding, the sorry
Traveling company called Fierce Desire,
These here on the left knowing only too well
What those on the right have been up to.
Patiently assembled on their glass senate
Floor, forever in session, the ayes
Have it over and over again (despite
Gloria Vanderbilt’s birthday gift,
A rough-cut back-country tobaccoed pine paw
That flatly refuses to take sides).
And of living hands, how many have I held,
As it were, for keeps—say, wordlessly,
After the promise that bodies can make, held
While staring at his sweetly shut eyes.
What, time and again, was I holding onto,
As if it had been for dear life’s sake?
Looking back, I guess I am glad they let go.
Theirs are not the hands that haunt me now.
The one that does belonged to a blustery,
Timid soul at home in dull routines,
Forfeiting glamour and curiosity,
A life sustained by its denials.
I reached for it, only because B-movies
Demand one pick it up off the sheet,
A shriveled, damp and fetid wedge still clutching
Nothing but a bed railing of air,
Its slackened tendons stiff and crusted with scabs
And knots of scar tissue abutting
Deep-sunk hematomas, from which the knucklebones
Jutted like cairns, nails cracked and yellow.
Though dead for hours, it was not yet cold.
I didn’t know what to do with it.
So I held onto it without wanting to,
Fearful of letting it go too soon.
It was what—now for the last time—I first held.
It was a hand. It was my mother’s.
My Robotic Prostatectomy
The surgeon sat at his desk in a niche
On the far side of the OR,
Ready to power up the robot
I lay facing, its arms still shrouded
In plastic as if just delivered
From the dry cleaners. My mask
Was snapped on, the drip unclamped.
That was the last I saw of this iron man
Whom a computer’s knobs directed
To motivate the forceps breaching
The tissue walls so elfin scissors
Could do what it once took three hags
To manage—hold, measure, and cut
The thread that would tie off the lemon-
Large defect planning in time
To bring the whole contraption down.
So what did they cut out of me?
My past? The source of the little death
Clenched at the climax of one
Of the few unambiguous pleasures
And now, slowly or suddenly, riddled
With a cancer only mildly threatening
But still urgently reminding me of how,
The older one gets, the past matters
Less and less. What’s wanted now,
I realize, is not my old life
Back again, but anyone’s life—
Yours, say, so long as it lasts.
If only a course of radiation
Next could scorch the still remaining
Traces of what is killing me—
Metastasizing nostalgia.
Oh, what did they cut out of me?
A future? I had imagined it as a shaded
Chaise near the pool, but will find myself
Shuffling in diapers, chapped and snappish,
Down its corridor, meanly overconfident,
Bored at having joined the ranks
Of be-ribboned Survivors who never stop
Nattering on about their close call.
When I check out, the receptionist
Reviews the charges and happens on
The overlooked pathologist’s
Report, and running her finger down
The rows of obscure acronyms
And variable percentages
To the bottom line, she looks up
Past my credit card, clucking
With good news: the borders are clear.
It is as if a mist has lifted
And he stands there on the other side,
The other iron man, not impatient
But, yes, more obvious than before,
Knowing that sooner or later I must,
Though the terms and timing are unknown,
Step forward at last to meet him, alone.
His Own Life
—Who scorns his own life is lord of yours.
—Seneca
The morning sunlight on the window ledge
Was the signal he should start to kill himself.
Weeks before, it had been carefully planned.
The pills were lined up on the tray beside his bed
In tiny piles so he could swallow ten at a time,
White oblongs ridged across the middle
Like a trench between Help and Helplessness.
It had been so long now and, a doctor himself,
He knew what more he would have to endure
Before the body had worn itself out.
The suppurating pustules were multiplying
In his anus that drooled or spewed out gouts
Of acid-hot blood, the trail of which
He saw from the john he could never reach in time.
Time. What had once been flashed on a screen
As a sequence of familiar shots from a past
No one else would understand—the father’s slap,
The sister’s moonlit breasts, the teacher’s pen,
The lover’s mole, the inch of vintage Mescal—
The carousel of slides we call a lifetime
I suppose went through his head, but how could I know?
It is as likely nothing was there, the mind stunned
And drifting from blurred maples in a square
To a painful wrinkle in the sheet beneath his thigh.
It was time. It was the plan. But it was hard to move.
He reached for the pills, pushing his hand deeper
Into the sun’s warmth, which quickly overtook
His arm, his neck, his face, until he surrendered.
When, embracing her, he seemed to hesitate,
His wife pleaded not to witness his courage
But to share it. He relented. They both opened their wrists
With his sword. Because of his frailty, his blood ran
Too slowly, so he cut the veins in his ankles and knees,
Then looked up, fearful he would lose his purpose
If his wife were forced to endure his torment.
He sent her away and summoned several scribes,
Sitting on the cold marble steps and dictating
Maxims still quoted today by those who think
They know how they would want to live a last day.
But death would not come. He asked a friend
To prepare the same poison used to execute
Those Athenian trials had condemned, and drank it down.
It was dark. It was the agreed-upon hour.
I had the key and quietly let myself in.
A lamp had been left on in the corridor.
I walked through its precaution towards the bedroom.
This is what we had decided, the dead man,
His lover, and I. I would “discover” the body.
The lover would pointedly—bantering with the doorman—
Arrive a half-hour later. Then, together,
We would call the police and, in one frantic
And one somber voice, report an apparent suicide.
The bedroom was dark, but I could see the body,
On the bed, under a sheet, its profile gaunt.
I turned the overhead light on and knew at once
Something was wrong. The face should be paler.
I went to it and screamed his name. Twice.
I heard the faintest groan. An eyelid moved.
There were too many pills still on the tray. Again
I called his name. I put my fingers on his neck,
But could feel nothing, hear nothing. I knew,
Though, that he was alive. I sat on the bed
Beside him and stared. Enough time passed
For shock not to have noticed. The doorbell rang.
What would I tell my friend now? What would we do?
I followed my crumbs of dread back to the door,
And opened it with the latch on as if expecting
The very person who was anxiously standing there.
I let him in, and could think of nothing but the truth.
“He’s still alive.” Eyes rolling back, he collapsed.
In a city where tyrants kill their mothers and children,
Why would they not soon turn against their teachers?
We may decide how but never precisely when
We leave. His barely clothed body was so cold
It stalled the poison’s effect. Silently,
They waited. Organizing a death as drama
Had proved too difficult, the tableau disarranged
By the mind’s eye in conflict with the body’s
Stubborn clutch at life, its blind refusal.
So what he thought would be was behind him now.
What good was sentiment or ideas? You shape,
When you can, the middle of things—where in fact
The story begins—not the beginning or the end.
He asked his slaves to carry him to the steam room.
Meanwhile, we sat in the living room, debating what
To think, to feel, to do. We decided the sun
Was to blame, its warmth sapping the will,
Lulling the dying man’s resolve, ruining the plan
He had weeks ago listened to abstractly,
Wanting and not wanting what he nodded to.
We spoke as if he were not in the next room.
We had three options. We could—this would be the one
He wanted—hold a pillow over his face
And do what he was finally unable to for himself.
Or we could leave and return the next day, hopeful
By then his weakness had solved the situation.
But there were witnesses that we were here now
And an autopsy would finger us as accomplices.
The third choice was inhuman but morally right.
Since I could not kill a man, even one I wanted dead,
And because I did not want to end up a criminal,
We called 911 and asked for an ambulance—
What our friend had begged to avoid, the Emergency
Room’s brutal vanities. Within minutes they had arrived
In battle gear, quickly guessed the truth,
Strapped the victim to the gurney and, with genuine
Deference, told us everything would be done
To see that it was a quick and painless death.
A silent ride to the hospital in the crowded back.
We sat at the foot of his bed as he was examined.
A nurse told everyone to wait in the hallway.
She drew a curtain and stayed inside with him.
First, he is lowered into a pool of hot water.
How long does it take to die? a young man asks.
A lifetime, the philosopher replies with a smile.
He hopes the water will speed both the blood
And the hemlock. When he sees the water darken,
He weakly takes a handful and sprinkles the slaves,
A libation to Jupiter the Liberator.
Let us continue our journey, he bade them next,
And they carried him at last to the steam room,
Where, choking, he soon suffocated.
His will, written while he was still powerful,
Specified his ashes be buried with no ceremony.
He would allow no one to praise or flatter him
For merely having anticipated his own death.
The doctor stood before us with a look
Whose pursed lips and downcast eyes
Spelled trouble. There had been a complication.
The nurse who had taken charge is a Catholic.
She says she sat with your friend for about an hour,
Then whispered to him, Do you want to live?
There was no response at first, but then she says
He said, Yes. Again she asked. Yes.
She reported it, leaving me no choice
But to do everything we can to keep him alive.
I know this is clearly not what anyone wants
But you must realize our legal jeopardy.
So a ventilator, mask, and tubes were brought.
Our comatose friend was wired back up to life.
It took him five more days to die of a racking
Pneumonia, never conscious but evidently
In horrid torment. The nurse had disappeared.
Did I hate her? Did I hate the friends
Who had involved me? Or hate myself
Who, like a slave lowering him into a pool
Of self-pity to make the poison work,
Had been forced to ask myself what to do?
And how in turn will I deal with the pain
Not of separation from but of attachment
To a body which has become a petulant
Tyrant? Whom will I ask to open the door
And discover me, to call out one last time
To the body lying there in a windowless room?
