is an anagram of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
When I learn I probably have a couple years,
maybe (catastrophically) less, crossword puzzles
begin to feel meaningless, though not the pair
of mergansers, not the red cardinal of my heart.
The sky does all sorts of marvelously uncatastrophic
things that winter I shimmy between science
& song, between widgeons & windows, weather
& its invitation to walk. Walking, which becomes
my lose less, my less morsels, my lose smile
while more sore looms. Sometimes I wander
for hours, my mile pace over half an hour,
everyone passing the lady at dusk talking
to herself about looming rooms, soil lies, ire
& else. Chuckling about my mileage gone down
the toilet, I plant the rose of before, the oil of after.
As each breath elevates to miracle, I become
both more & less of who I’d been, increasingly
less concerned about the dishes in the sink,
more worried about the words in my notebooks,
all those unfinished poems. I remember the fear
of getting lost if I left the main trail. I remember
molehills, actual molehills, piles of salty roe,
mountains of limes. Catastrophically, it’s rare:
one in 500,000, but then I learned the odds
of being born: one in 42 billion, though not sure
how they calculate, or the chances of the cosmos
having just the right amount of force to not
break apart. Less smiles. More lose. Miser miles.
A sis & bro whom I’ll leave like a sinking island,
Ferdinandea, that submerged volcano in Sicily,
though let’s be real: I was more pen mole than lava,
more a looming annoyance than a bridge
to some continent. I’d wanted to be composted,
but it would cost 9K to convert me to dirt, so I opted
for whatever was easiest to carry across state lines,
some of me beside my mother & father, bits of me
on San Juan Island, at Jakle’s Lagoon & Seward Park,
where I’d wandered like a morose remorse,
a lore-less reel, a miser silo, a doddering crow.