Someone I love is dying, which is why, when I turn the key in the ignition and back the car out of the parking space in the underground garage, and the radio comes on, sudden and loud, something by Haydn, a diminishing fugue, and maneuver the car through the dimly lit tunnels with their low ceilings, following the yellow arrows stenciled at intervals on the gray cement walls, I think of him, moving slowly through the last hard days of his life and I can't stop crying. When I arrive at the toll gate I have to make myself stop thinking as I dig in my pockets for the last of my coins, turn to the attendant, indifferent in his blue smock, his white hair curling like smoke around his weathered neck, and say Thank you, like an idiot, and drive into the blinding midday light. Everything is hideously symbolic, and everything reminds me of cancer: the Chevron truck, its rounded underbelly spattered with road grit and the sweat of last night's rain, the dumpster behind the flower shop, its sprung lid pressing down on dead wedding bouquets-- even the smell of something simple, coffee drifting from the open door of a cafe and my eyes glaze over, ache in their sockets. For months now all I've wanted is the blessing of inattention, to move carefully from room to room in my small house, numb with forgetfulness. To eat a bowl of cereal and not imagine him, scrubbed thin and pale, unable to swallow. How not to imagine the tumors ripening beneath his skin, flesh I have kissed, stroked with my fingertips, pressed my belly and breasts against, some nights so hard I thought I could enter him, open his back at the spine like a door or a curtain and slip in like a small fish between his ribs, nudge the coral of his brain with my lips, brushing over the blue coils of his bowels with the fluted silk of my tail. Death is not romantic. He is dying, no matter how I see it, no matter what I believe, that fact is stark and one dimensional, atonal, a black note on an empty staff. My feet are cold, but not as cold as his, and I hate this music that floods the cramped insides of my car, my head, slowing the world down with its lurid majesty, transforming everything I see into some sort of memorial to life, no matter how ugly or senseless-- even the old Ford in front of me, its battered rear end thinning to scallops of rust, pumping black classical clouds of exhaust into the shimmering air-- even the tenacious nasturtiums clinging to a fence, vine and bloom of the insignificant, music spilling from their open faces, spooling upward, past the last rim of blue and into the still pool of another galaxy, as if all that emptiness were a place of benevolence, a destination, a peace we could rise to.© Dorianne Laux
from Smoke, BOA Editions, Ltd.