(In memory of Frank Paino, MD)
Now you have no voice
beyond the respirator’s
double-noted dirge.
Here, where a knife
of summer light shears
a white wound
across bleached bedsheets,
the bright hosannas
of those you healed
draw back like tide
before a killing wave,
and I see a man
who’s powerless to grant
himself that same
deft clemency.
Still, you raise yourself
from the railed bed’s pillow
to scrawl the seven
syllables of your breathless
conclusion:
the first word round as a spoon-
ful of wild honey,
the next almost Edenic.
No way to make them
mean you’ll get out of this
alive.
