What Does Your Seeing Want?
Your scrunched eye seizes, sizes
me up: pulley-roped palliatives, craft and lies.
Washing my hands in the back, I wonder:
what's a good death?
Of course you held on and I held on to you.
We had married ourselves to a trance.
Copyright © 2017 by Joan Houlihan. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 25, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem is part of an elegiac book-length sequence called Shadow-feast. The poem enacts the thoughts of a caregiver in the presence of a terminal illness.”
—Joan Houlihan
Joan Houlihan
Joan Houlihan is the author of Ay (Tupelo Press, 2014), The Us (Tupelo Press, 2009), The Mending Worm (New Issues Press, 2006), and Hand-Held Executions (Del Sol Press, 2003). She currently teaches in Lesley University’s low-residency MFA program and at Clark University. She lives in Massachusetts.