NaWUPoBo, #1
I am currently a nurse aide by trade, working with a large geriatric population. That means I spend a lot of time with the dying and about to die. What this is teaching me, among other things, is how questionable our convictions are; not only concerning what it means to die, but what we desperately want to believe "dying" means. There are a lot of Baby Boomers writing poetry right now about their parents, peers or elders dying. I am thinking Donald Hall, Jack Gilbert, Amy Gerstler, Marie Howe (I am sure there are many more) but looking over the body of work I think just how limited and desperate our poetry concerning death appears. How it repeats itself in the few "facts" we believe in. Or to put slightly differently, even though everyone agrees death is a great mystery, how many of our poems demand to state something concrete about death? State some undeniability, some terrible fact, some wild ultimatum?
For two years I have watched and helped numerous of my residents pass through the last stages of life. I know nothing about death and yet I work with it everyday. However, to me, ideas of "the ghost in the machine," that the body and soul are separate entities, seems odd. I think, "obviously that was thought up by someone who never worked with a dying population."
I have under my care right now a resident, "Crysta,"1 who is currently dying. She had brain cancer years ago, and the chemotherapy has rendered her into what might be termed as a "vegetable" state. The term "brain dead" gets bantered around a lot, not just in poetry about death but in the medical community as well. However, how do we know what "brain dead" is? How do we know when the "animus," that spark that brings our soul and spirit and flesh together, has left the body?
I do not know. I am amazed at our hubris that we know anything. I work in sonnets nowadays, so here is Day #1's sonnet. I have no idea tomorrow where this will take me. Lester Young is on the stereo, Getting Something Out of Life, ironically. I leave the rest, my friends, up to you.
When the brain is dead we say the body
is no longer infected by the soul.
As if rot was the body's primary,
mechanical goal. Deprived of control,
animus, are we simply carrion
with sass? A carcass of ash and panache?
Is it possible to dismiss Zion?
We put Crysta on comfort measures; wash
away the pus, sweat, urine, swab her tongue,
endlessly. Who can tell when her divine
machine stops being divine? When the shell
has no more ghost? What odd belief, among
us, the animus, that the gods assign
foresight to this subsistence where we must dwell.
- H.I.P.P.A. law to privacy does not allow me to disclose any information about my residents so I am using a name that works well with the iambic rhythm I was trying for. [back]