THE GIFT OF PROPHESY
You’ll remember a trip south;
the woman you went to live with for awhile;
the woman you told cancer
when you didn’t have cancer. You said
you were dying of the current dying
because you didn’t know how else it could all be taken: what nobody
can say: I am living of something.
MY BROTHER
What’s wrong with that?
I want to say to anyone
who doesn’t believe sometimes
he comes back inside the language
a book is talking in or more demonstrably in my yellow cat: Cyrus
who stays on the bed when I am leaving, as if the slightest
move of fur would let my brother out.
How can possession know how much space
it takes up in a body smaller than the one where it started – when it was called
living?
WASHING THE CORPSE
After he was dead we washed his body.
Nick and Michael and I stood in Billy’s hospital room
and after whatever it was (his spirit looking for the door?)
stopped making the room vibrate and lighten and become heavy again
we took the washcloth or whatever it was – something from the hospital, something rising
hotly out of a silver basin – and started at his feet
and worked our way up the body that was only his body on the bed.
And the women that had been in the room
while the spirit was directing the air
had left the room so that it was now only men
only us doing the last thing that would ever be done to Billy’s body.
We were making Billy new.
We were making Billy what was over.
Copyright © 2010 by Michael Klein
No comments:
Post a Comment