Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones. Lucia Perillo

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      I watched the one male nurse turn pale as ash

      when he knelt to certify the heartbeat

      of this man whose lips were blue and wet.

      The other nurse took the group to the auditorium,

      saying James isn’t feeling very well right now.

      James is sick. Get away from him. Then I heard

      the dopey music of the automated slide show

      behind those doors from which she never reappeared.

      The male nurse was too young to leave stranded

      with a man down on the smooth wood floor:

      his cheek still velvet, his dark fingers

      worrying the valleys of the man’s white wrist.

      He’s okay, he’s breathing, as the man’s skin

      turned gray, his mouth open, a cherry sore

      at either edge. I don’t remember what I did at first,

      I must have puttered off to perform some

      stupid task that would seem useful —

      gathering premoistened towelettes

      or picking up the phone while the nurse repeated

      He’s okay, he’s breathing. But the colors

      got worse until nothing could spare me

      from having to walk my hand in the crease

      of the man’s blue throat, where his carotid

      should have pulsed. Nothing.

      I said You breathe for him and I’ll compress,

      and for a while we worked together like a clumsy

      railroad handcar, me humping at arm’s length

      over the ribs, the nurse sealing his lips around

      the man’s scabbed mouth, while yellow mucus

      drained from James’s eyes and nose and throat.

      Each time the nurse pressed his mouth to the man’s

      like a reluctant lover, the stink of cud

      was on his lips when he lifted up. Sometimes

      he had to hold his face out to the side,

      to catch a few breaths of good salt air.

      Until he was no longer able to choke back his gut

      and asked whether I would trade places with him.

      For a moment I studied the man’s staved chest,

      which even my small knuckles had banged to jelly,

      then the yellow pulp that flecked the nurse’s lips,

      that sour, raw smell from their mix of spit.

      And I said: No. I don’t think I could...

      It’s strange what we do with the dead

      — burning them or burying them in earth —

      when the body always tries to revert to water.

      Later, a doctor called to say the man’s heart

      had exploded like a paper sack: death hooked him

      before he even hit the floor. So everything we did

      was useless — we might as well have banged a drum

      and blown into a horn. And notice how I just said “we” —

      as though the nurse and I had somehow married

      spirits in a pact of gambled blood, when in truth

      the nurse, like the man, rode off in an ambulance,

      the man for a pointless go-round in the ER, the nurse

      for a shot of gamma globulin, while I stood

      in the parking lot, picking lint off my shirt.

      End of story. Except that since then James

      has followed me, showing up sometimes at the house

      to read my gas meter, sometimes behind the counter

      where I ask him what I owe. No surprise then

      that I’ve made my life with another James,

      who swears my biggest defect is still the limits

      on what I’ll bring myself to do for someone else.

      I know there are people who’ll cut out their kidney

      to replace a friend’s cankered one, people

      who’ll rush into burning buildings to save the lives

      of strangers. But every time I ponder selflessness

      I hear the beats of my heart, that common loon,

      most primitive of birds. Then my life seems most

      like a naked, frail thing that must be protected,

      and I have suddenly become its mother, paddling

      with my own life saddled on my back.

      There’s one last thing I didn’t mention —

      when I refused to breathe for the dying James

      what happened next was that I began to laugh:

      a thin laugh, nervous laugh… but loud enough

      to drift outside, where it stood on the hill

      and creaked its wings a minute before lifting—

      over the levees, across those shallowest of waters.

Needles

      So first there’s the chemo: three sticks, once a week,

      twenty-six weeks.

      Then you add interferon: one stick, three times a week,

      forever.

      And СКАЧАТЬ