September 28, 2021Midnight in the Covid ICU in Rural Alabama
Where there is pain, the remedy follows:
wherever the lowlands are, the water goes.
If you want the water of mercy, make yourself low …
—Rumi, “The Mathnawi”
“How do you spell daughter?”
she says, her shoulders sagging low
over the consent form, her penmanship a treason.
“I can’t write in cursive.” My head cocks to the side.
“Do you understand?” I ask, “If I lay her flat to do this, she might die.” Her eyes are a house
with dark windows, stilts buckling under the threat of the wave.
Her hand wavers.
I think of my own daughter,
sound asleep, hot little hands hanging low
her dreams warm as sun-
light, I’ll have to strip naked before I come inside
bleach the blood and sickness off my shoes before I come in the house.
I wish it was a new feeling, watching this woman’s little son
kick the linoleum and put his thumb inside
his mouth. I live in a divided house
kicking linoleum an island apart from the grief that falls like waves
of fat black flies and maggot daughters
swarming a carcass in the lowlands.
“Is Ma ever coming back to the house?”
I look over, the sickness seeps from her pores, fetid water from polluted waves.
“I don’t know,” I tell the daughter.
“Her sats are so low,”
the nurse says. I say “I don’t know,” but by sun-
rise, she’ll be wailing like a beast from the hillside.
I walk in the room. Bedside,
she looks small. Her small dreams a warm house
for her kids to live in. The ventilator charts the waves
of her breath. Her daughter
makes herself low,
her voice smaller than her son.
I make myself low.
I seethe in the ransom of my thoughts—crimson—
but needless, so needless. I push the side
of the scalpel into her thigh. She’s the victim of a house
divided. The flags diminished, waving
in surrender, wondering what will become of the mothers and daughters.
I wave sleep aside
and mop the floor of the ruined house. The sun
hangs low. I drive home to my daughter.
from Poets Respond