My father, lungs a-warble, spreads his arms on the nursing
home bed,
swoops low over rough, unfamiliar terrain. The hospice nurse
ticks off procedures.
My mother signs papers with her large, lush loops, so ravishing,
more ravishing than the chicken-scratch scrawl of my father’s
hand,
clubbed now, a long-lost claw—phylogenesis recapitulated, and
ontogenesis, too.
Overhead, the geese tootle toward the marsh.
They’re rolling the old folks into the commons, lining them up
before the TV.
I look out the window. The geese have landed,
foraging slowly on the manicured lawn, unruffled, for now,
by organochlorides and organophosphates and their
amplification
in the rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat blood of a bird. And 2 and 4 and 2 and
4,
my father’s bent language its own looping code, laying an egg
like a parrot,
and every so often an embarrassed embarrassed and every so
often a dammit.
“Our relationship wasn’t exactly warm and fuzzy,” my mother
blinks
behind drugstore specs. They make her look owlish.
She isn’t owlish; she’s ravishing, more ravishing than ever she
was
back in the days when the couch was her tether and pills were
her hood
and my father flew at her with razor blades lashed to his feet.
The hospice nurse ticks off further procedures.
The geese crop the grass; their idyll won’t last. The city, half-
cocked,
is gunning for them, hatching a brood of lethal procedures
to rid itself of the soft, light bodies so hazardous to man in
flight.

Poets

Betsy Andrews

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