Updated: Jul 23, 2022
What Else Could We Do
What else could we do, the parents you eschewed
at 18, when you came back, scared and sick,
at the proverbial bottom we had heard about
again and again from counselors and 12-step
programs and friends. Here you are or were
finally spent, skinny as teen who ran the soccer field
and laughed, not laughing, defeated by disease,
back in your old room, the one you fled by climbing out
the window after third failed re-hab had taught you
that we were toxic, more poison than the choices
you made, the black dominoes forever falling.
You were so skinny and pale, a white flag, surrender
at 38, a fountain of tears and thanks
and apologies, close enough to the black hole
for fear to have caught hold, the chronic pain you complained
about rooted now in doctor's eyes and the barbed hook
of single diagnosis dire. You were back with us,
at last, our one and only girl. Your blond hair drifted,
an early snow fall, in your bed, on the couch, in the bath,
until we shaved the rest and left you with a patchy
fuzz like too-much-loved teddy bear petted partly bald,
like someone tortured and starved. What could we do but buy
you wigs and silken head scarves, divide your many meds
in daily plastic dispenser, and sit beside you
among the old people at the infusion center
and in the humming chill of the hospital room.
Just as we sat and cheered in sun or rain at soccer
games and in hardwood din of basketball in the gym,
we stayed in our places until the final play.
leaving the hospital when its finally over
sun-stunned, invalided, barely able to walk for glare and air
so bright, so big after the days inside, the sound shifted, different, listen
like a siren gone past and wailing away from us or the movie effect
of jumping through time, listen, sound sucked away so the people
passing us move their mouths like pantomime, the shapes of words
empty on their lips, the cars silent as electricity, the valley gulls
in their tight circles mute as the sky for once we lean into each other
like a three-legged stagger in a giant world, expansive rush and run
of colors, everything blown out from our ground zero, us alone
in the parking lot, lost, our cars adrift on swelling sea and us, bobbing,
treading toward the small solid islands of before, of before and now after
Hard Lesson
Before I understood the genius of grief,
how it scorches imperfections from memory
and clears the frivolous from thought, winnowing
the chaff from the precious, how it threshes
to essence (the sky a bluer, wider distance
the night a longer, deeper silence),
before I understood how it blasts new space
where solid once was, where hard rock organs
did their daily duty and jostled each
against another, no room in the crowded inn
of me, before I understood how it teaches
the agonized up-reaching limbs of bare oaks,
their bent and twisted beseeching, their ageless ache,
as well as the immobile stupefaction of stones,
before I understood the genius of grief,
I had to enter the stunned and stunted land of loss
where time quick-stepped and dragged at once and gilded guilt
shuffled in plush robe and slippers through hollowed rooms,
an elegant, muttering insomniac
reciting mistakes, the manifold ways I failed,
the disappointments and hurts I instigated.
I had to enter that land where echoes rang my ears
and breathing felt foreign, a labor past my strength,
before grief distilled itself in my emptied chalice.
Cecil Morris retired after 37 years of teaching high school English, and now he tries writing himself what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and (maybe) enjoy. He likes ice cream too much and cruciferous vegetables too little for his own good. He has had a handful of poems published in Cobalt Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Evening Street Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Poem, and other literary magazines.