October Elegy

The following poem is being published in the 2009 edition of Limestone (University of Kentucky).


OCTOBER ELEGY


for Fred Burdette

It started in his lungs, black and tar-spackled.
Spread to his liver, stomach, intestine. Soon his
legs refused to carry him, and when he could
no longer hobble to the toilet on those shriveled
bone-stalks, it was my aunt who came to stay.
She tended him. Sat in the heat of his bedroom.
Tolerated, for hours on end, the scent of urine
and ether. Knew the heaving burn of his chest.
Bathing him, hands pressing against his pallid skin,
she must have noticed the scars: ones from the
war flecking the right flank of his torso, a new one
from the surgery cleaving the column of his ribs.
In the heavy light of those afternoons she read to
him, stories that reminded him of the Belgian winter,
huddled in a foxhole, 1945, burying his body in
the earth to absorb the heat of another’s breathing.
When the pain became too much, it was she who
bore his screams: In his madness he’d wail deep
into the night, cursing her with the low growl of
his voice. Later, as things began to dissipate, he
babbled to her with a lolling cluck of the tongue,
his language, mind, mangled with obscenity.