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Publication Date: January 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0962782879
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015908187
Trade Paper 6″ x 9″
From the Heart Press
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Selected poems from And Now Still will appear below the contents in November and December 2015.
CONTENTS
Holiday Death Math 1
He Could Spin a Yarn
Worth a Shit 5
Day of Hearts 7
A Goddamn Leg 11
Nursing Home Goodbyes 12
The Hall Closet in Winter 13
The Other Side 14
Selected Journal Entries 15
She Rarely Let Him Finish
New Tricks 41
Sanitize Your Pores 43
Dialysis Days 45
November 16, 1999 47
November 19, 1999 49
November 22, 1999 51
What Else? 53
December 2, 1999 55
We All Want Her 57
What Do You Want to Do? 58
4:32 PM 60
The Ingredients 63
Christmas Spirit 65
The Dance We Always Share 67
“Tidied” 69
Resurrection 71
She Created Beauty
Bump 77
(Some of) Her Own Words 80
Creation Continues 81
Remembering Is Preferable 83
Please Don’t Abandon Me 84
Still on the Bed 85
The Sniper 88
Awaiting the Judges 90
13 Ways of Looking at Wells Fargo 92
Five Years Later 108
And Now, Still
And Now, Still 113
Nuclear Family 117
Writing Again 119
Surprised by Grief 122
Nursing Home Return 124
The Rickety Bridge 125
The Wound 127
When I Make Myself Small 129
First Family
Fillet of Soul With a Dark Night Glaze 133
Freedom 140
You Stood Up 142
Knowing 144
The Old Lesson Again (and Again) 146
Afterwordledgements 149
About the Author 151
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HOLIDAY DEATH MATH
My father left a leg-and-a-half along
with the rest of his 88-year-old body
on Valentine’s Day 1996. My mother
dropped her 83-year-old multiple-
bypassed heart, dialysized kidney and
early colon cancer between the turkey
and the tree on December 15, 1999,
30 days before my January 15, 2000
wedding and 10 years and 9 months
before my sister slowed, then
brought her heart to zero on St. Patrick’s
Day, 2009, three-quarters through her 55th
year, leaving 9,000 Cardizem nanograms
in her still tired blood. And me, my hips
are only 12 years old in my 61st year and
I’ve got long-term plans for them and some
200-plus bones and assorted organs, but I
can’t help notice that February 14, December
15, and March 17 scream for January 16 and
they’re screaming directly at me, albeit
without a specific year. And while the day
after my anniversary means less now that
I’m no longer married, with not quite 13
years of marriage and the continuing education
of divorce, I feel I’m beginning to understand
some things, and in no hurry to go anywhere
without this body, especially to fulfill a
coincidental family death sequence or
arbitrary arithmetic progression. Of course,
their 75-year average age of death is just six
tenths of a year lower than statistical U.S. males,
and I could bump that to 80 with a sex change or
deeper embrace of my feminine side, or to 79 by
becoming Japanese. These trajectories land somewhere
between 2029 and 2034, but my father smoked for 70
years and made it to 88, albeit minus half-a-leg but
with original hips, and I’ve never smoked, have a
resting pulse of 58, total cholesterol 169, triglycerides
56, and I’ve been laughing more than 50 years – long
before Norman Cousins prescribed it. Shit. I might live
forever. The Grim Reaper will be a Grin Reaper when
I’m done with her. I eat fillet of soul with a dark night
glaze and midnight chocolate cake, I know I’m vast
emptiness, eternal presence and original face, and that
infamous Buddhist hot dog vendor can’t make me one
with everything because I always, already am.
And with relish.
To boot.
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For additional poems from And Now, Still, click here.
