Today

A call is just a call. I pick it up.

Jan.6.2022

I lift blankets looking for my father.

Jan.7.2022

When I take off the patch, your eye is gone.

I spend the day in other people’s tears.

Jan.9.2022

Someone says your eyelid almost came off,

the doctors tried to reattach it. I

close my eye all day to see if I can

feel your dying. What is dying but a

form of hunger, visible to God. When

we pull down your shirt, your good eye opens.

All the waiting, the moon is an athlete.

Jan.11.2022

The woman who let you fall won’t look at

me. In each of us, there is a stranger,

a single road that in one instant forks.

Jan.12.2022

There’s a name for it. The way your mouth stays

open, no breathing. We hold our breaths as

if companions of your dying. Cheyne-Stokes,

named after two doctors. What if we named

everything? The last hand-squeeze before death,

the way your eye looks at me when I talk,

the way the reincarnated cry the

most, bewildered by the star’s second blink.

Jan.13.2022

I tell a story about something, with

my arms waving. And your arm grabs mine, as

if I am a messiah. But really

I withheld food and drink from you so that

your feet that loved to walk would never touch

the ground again. And I wonder why we

are always on our hind legs, to see what?

Jan.15.2022

Maybe we feel dizzy because we are

moving and so is the earth. On some days,

I can tell the earth is rotating in

another direction. Today I meet

a hospice nurse named Harsh. He is sweet, sweet.

Jan.16.2022

They drop the morphine under your tongue. How

it must feel like a faint raindrop taken

from the sky. It’s been two weeks since the fall

and death still catches me by surprise.

I feel nothing. It is raining morphine.

Jan.17.2022

No matter how I scold you, you won’t die.

Meanwhile, there are no birds in the sky, they

have all flown into your brain. I always

knew that our thoughts were birds, but I didn’t

know they would return for the funeral.

Jan.18.2022

Five breaths. Then a minute of not breathing.

I time it, announce it, as if you are

running a race. You would have loved winning

this race to annihilation. Because

you are winning, your mouth is shaped like an O,

has been open for fourteen days now, as

if to say you aren’t done telling me

that Rilke’s Open doesn’t exist, that

our eyes aren’t inverted, that we can see

everything an animal sees with our

eyes closed and our mouths open. If I lean in,

I can hear all the words said in your

life, now in a different order. There’s still

no love, even though I’ve looked through all the

words twice. I go digging in the mass grave

of language for the extra loves and I

end up bringing loneliness back with me.

Jan.19.2022

Every phone call says the same thing, that he

is hanging on. And I imagine you

holding on to the edge of a building,

the city’s mouths waiting for you to jump.

Jan.20.2022

Today is your birthday. Someone came in

and said, they’re still not feeding him? thinking

I was someone else. The eyes press against

the glass of my brain. They can’t touch me but

they won’t stop looking. Eyeballs have footsteps

too. When they walk, they sound sticky. Hundreds

of them have gathered outside the window.

Jan.22.2022

The sky is crooked at my feet. I’m tired

of someone else’s dying. I’ve lost two

pounds because I’ve been chewing rain instead

of swallowing it. Because you haven’t

been eating or drinking, all the food I

eat tastes twice as dead. Twice as good. In the

room down the hall, a man has a stroke, half

of his body splits off. The caretakers

gossip. My sister won’t stop crying, keeps

telling everyone she was your favorite.

Jan.23.2022

They called me at 4:30 am and

I don’t remember what they said. But I

know they never said the word death or died.

Jan.24.2022

The funeral home calls and I open

your checkbook, a balance of mocking birds.

Jan.26.2022

On my notebook, a large group of ants. I

wonder why they had only gathered there

and on Etel Adnan’s Time. They walk on

these words: When no one is waiting for us

any longer, there’s death, so faithful. I

spend the morning killing ants and wonder

how many insects I have killed until

now. All the killing to prepare me to

forgo the feeding tube. Yesterday I

drove past a group of boys running without

their shirts. At the stoplight I could only

see the way their sweat lifted from them. And

I realized the ants weren’t coming from the

floor but were coming from my words. Down the

road, another group of runners going

in the opposite direction, having

no idea of the other runners. All

this time, I thought I didn’t know a thing.

Jan.27.2022

When death was near, I could touch time. It was

softer than I thought it would be. There were

two of them. When I tried to measure their

lengths, I was sent back to the living. I

was shorter but my shadow was longer.

Jan.31.2022

I read you ten poems, eight-hundred-fifty-

nine lines, I had fourteen coffees, nine creams,

twenty-three bobas. I cried zero times.

Feb.1.2022

Another day went by. Still no feeling.

Why is language the only thing I have?

I wonder if it’s possible to live

by persistence, wanting so badly to

remain secured to the body, that his

soul left fourteen years before its vessel.

When asked when a painting was done, Rothko

said, there’s tragedy in every brushstroke.

Feb.3.2022

A man from the funeral home called me.

His voice was so flat, I took a nap while

he talked. When I woke up, I was in the

casket looking up at the ceiling fan.

I couldn’t move my body and a patch

covered my left eye. I heard my own voice

describing my fall onto a knob, how

I lost my left eye, how I refused to

die. And then I saw myself bend over

to look at me. My own hand grabbed my hand

but I couldn’t feel it or move my eye.

I saw myself for who I was—evil,

full of syllables. Poets are useless.

Feb.4.2022

Twice now I’ve thought about the wood casket

and what proportion of the ashes are

wood. Twice now I’ve read about the chamber,

this time I learn it is called a retort,

also a sharp reply. This time, I read

about the pugilistic stance when they

burn the body, the boxer-like pose the

body makes. I think about my father,

alone in the retort, in a small box,

two thousand degrees, his legs bent, his fists

ready to punch me and my live flesh.

Feb.6.2022

The cows have spread out and I have counted

fourteen. Their heads always hang down. They don’t

seem to need to look up. In that way, they

are unlike us. Our euphoria that

comes directly from despair. Look up, we

say, to remind us that we will all die.

Here, the sky is made of nothing. It is

so vast that the twenty-five people who

live here don’t have enough sight to change it.

Feb.9.2022

Today they burned my father. A man named

Garrett called me, in his toneless voice, to

say that someone cleaned his body, covered

him in white linen. After the man called,

I felt warmer all day. My body reached

two thousand degrees but would not burn. I

realized I had not thought of my father

more than once in Wyoming. You’d never

know the planet is dying. Here, the clouds

have holes in them and the deer are more etched

with shadow. A sandwich arrives at my

door at noon. I’m so hungry that I eat

the sandwich first, then think of my father.

Feb.10.2022

Today the river is in crisis, no

horizon dares to go near it. Today

my father is in a small jar. At dusk,

I went into a painter’s studio,

saw his stretched canvas on the table, white,

empty. What are we without those who made

us? May his memory be your blessing,

people emailed me all week. The artist

was painting a series of doors, which were

so real that I walked through the one that was

slightly open. Inside the room was my

breath that I had held since January

13, an eyelid, a loose eyeball, the

knob the eye fell on, the girl’s hands that tried

to catch him, which were charred and still waving.

Feb.11.2022

The white truck went from one frame to the next

and I thought of the time when someone lied

about me. How day and night I cared so

much about the lie that it split into

two, one part went out the left window frame,

the other out the right. Like the blue car

that disappears at the same time as the

white one, yet I can see both at once. When

they burned my father’s body, I wondered

if the eyeballs spread so far on each side

that they could see Wyoming, these two panes,

me on a small brown chair, looking out the

windows, waiting for oblivion to

travel through with its eighteen wheels and truth.

Feb.12.2022

At the beginning of our family tree

was hope. Or maybe it was just an owl.

Feb.13.2022

The same wind was blowing here eighty years

ago, always snapping families in half.

Feb.14.2022

If I keep the window closed, I am stuck

inside with language as it buzzes back

and forth, trying to get out and start wars.

My sister is the only one left. If

she is the favorite of nothing, then

I must be one of Calvino’s cities,

the one with angular shadows, the one

that when turned on its side, becomes a line.

Feb.15.2022

The caskets are shaking. The white-tailed deer

gently cross the river. I hike up the

hill to find my feelings. Instead, I run

into Hope, who doesn’t look at me or

stop, but walks down the hill. Today could be

a day where everything is beautiful.

Feb.16.2022

Yesterday, I walked to the small chapel,

head down, yet all the people driving by

waved to me as if they knew what I had

just done, as if they knew I was going

to the chapel. When I got there, fourteen

white-tailed deer stopped and stared, moving away

from me, as if they also knew. Inside, the

cold mixed with the cold from my body and

the moment of mixing, the stained glass, and

my sobbing finally came. It was so

delayed that I wasn’t sure if I was

crying for the deer that wouldn’t stay, or

the nine people I had just met and would

soon leave behind, the snow that would

come after I am gone, or my father.

I left a note in the guest book, wrote his

name. Above it, Thomas and Claire Bushnell,

married the day before my father’s death,

a tribute to Traveler, one of the

best horses ever. It’s time to go home.

Feb.17.2022

Each of us comes from somewhere with blossoms.