Scree
Long scree of pill bottles
spilling over the tipped brim
of the wicker basket, fifty or more,
a hundred,
your name on every one and under
your name the brusque rune of instructions—
which ones to take, how many, and often,
on what days,
with or without food, before or
after eating, impossible
toward the end to keep them all straight,
not even
with your charts, your calendars, the bottles
ranged in sequence along the kitchen
counter—you always so
efficient,
organized, never without a plan,
even when planning had come down
to this and nothing more, for there was
still a future
in it, though the future reached
only from one bottle to
the next, from pill to pill, each one
another
toehold giving way
beneath you on the steep slope
you never stopped struggling against,
unable not
to climb, and then, when climbing
was impossible, not to try slowing
the quickening descent. You had
descended now,
your body thinned to the machine
of holding on, while I exhausted
by the vigil, with all your medicine
spread before me,
looked for something, anything
at all to help me sleep.
To help me for a short while anyway
not be
aware of you, your gaunt hand
clutching the guardrail, your eyes
blind, flitting, scanning, it seemed,
the air above them
for their own sight, and the whimper
far back in the throat, the barely
audible continuous
half-cry half-
wheeze I couldn’t hear and not think
you were saying something, though
I couldn’t make out what. I wanted
to sleep,
I wanted if just for that one night
to meet you there on that steep slope,
the two of us together, facing
opposite
directions, I, because I wasn’t
dying, looking down, desiring
what you, still looking up, resisted,
because you were.
Copyright Credit: Alan Shapiro, “Scree” from The Dead Alive and Busy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000). Copyright © 2000 by Alan Shapiro. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
Source: The Dead Alive and Busy (The University of Chicago Press, 2000)