Suitcase Song

John-O was given a key to the apartment. The deal

was this: if Phil died suddenly, and John-O heard,

he would rush on over, enter the apartment, leave

unseen with Phil’s brown suitcase, and secretly pitch it

into the mounded deeps of the city dump.

Simply, there were things that Phil didn’t want

to hurt his family with. Do you have yours?

I have mine. The brown suitcase. Sasha’s sister,

on her deathbed—dinky, frail, just a mild

skim-milk trickle of a hospice patient—

tensed, sat up, and unloosed

such confessional invective that it seemed the walls

and the sheets would have to be splattered in shit,

her cancer having acted with the harsh, disbursing

force of a tornado on the brown and hard-shelled

suitcase in her electrochemical memory webs.

Is yours secure? from love? from sodium pentathol?

Last year, when a tornado hit our fringe

of downtown businesses, the air was alive for counties around

with the downward dance of naked canceled checks,

handwritten notes, hotel receipts, e-mail transcripts,

smeary Polaroids, a swirl of lacy underwisps

that jellyfished the skies, and from The G-Spot Shoppe

a rain of plastic pleasure aids, of which one prime example

pierced a cow between the eyes and struck her dead.

Maybe AIDS—I wasn’t sure. But he was dying,

that was sure: as dry as a stick of human chalk,

and making the terrible scritch-sound of a stick of chalk,

in his throat, in the community air, in the room

across from Sasha’s sister. Something . . . hidden

in the trace of rundown aura still around him

as we chatted there one morning . . . a tv? a sissyboy tv?

I wasn’t sure, but it was obvious

his life-chalk held a story not yet written,

not confessed yet

for this storyniverous planet.

And when I remembered my mother’s own

last days . . . the way a person is a narrative,

the strength of which is either

revelation or withholding. It was summer, and the garden

at the nursing home was fat with summer’s pleasures:

flowered mounds like reefs of coral,

bees as globular as whole yolks.

In her room, my mother disappeared a breath

at a time, and everything else was only a kind of scenery for that.

The wink of pollen in the light. The birds. Their feather-lice.

The bursting spores. Those opened-up

cicada husks abandoned on the patio

—the small, brown, unlocked luggage

that’s completed its work in this world.

Source: Poetry (April 2000)