myeloma

marrow

1)

every bone in the house
is creaking now

like shaky stair-boards when
they protest as your sleepy
footsteps crack
their backs --

you can touch the echoes
as they slides down the slippery
wooden vertebrae

through our bodies
through the walls
with their pink insulation
frayed like your fading marrow

& they go tunneling
through your heart –

2)

for you know full well
my sister only says
she loves you
as a selfish reflex
of a guilty conscience;

so if you die she can absolve
herself immediately, pure
sweet & martyred, poor
fatherless child!

so she can still come home late,
with nicotine tooth-stubs shed
on the doorstep,
a poisonous but sparkling
heart, wailing & stumbling up those
tired railings
drunk

& maybe she’ll visit him
sometime, but she’s got
no structural integrity:

she’ll go
if it fits in her schedule
between sleeping with
strange boyfriends
& those hungover sleeping-ins.

3)

she’s never home,
of course, but
it’s really you
the dog is keeping vigil for –

shuddering quietly at the
door, waiting;

outside the yellow-white
weeping birch bone trees
whipped in the winter wind.

the chill of a nosebleed,
a cell-creek the only water
in the february drought –

& mama, i held her hand
last night, soft stomach
of worry turning itself
inside out –

for your frame is fragile as
a dry fish skeleton separating,
turning slowly
to salt –

what is left of you, what
is left of us to hold
you through?

(i am my mother’s daughter
but my father’s son
too)

what is there but blood
& spiral sequences,
a strange glue –

i’ll be the paste between
the tendons,
i’ll be our new connective
tissue,

you grew me from your cells once.
& now you say
i’m grown up,

(i could be your parent too)

4)

today you stood up
for the first time,
your new shrunken bones
shaky.

aged a decade in
mint green pyjamas, white
salt-lines on your lips,
the scruffy white beard
of seventeen days without
the strength for shaving.

you are the old man
& the sea, adrift on your
hospital bed --

your body betrayed you,
left you trying
to vanquish the marlin

swimming through your feverish
doldrums, the monster
in the sea of morphine –

sharks have sucked your
marrow dry, this disease
has no cure but i know
that you are
tougher than hemingway

& i know that right now
you will survive,
even if you must return
to the sea someday