"Night Run"

Click here to listen to Lynn Emanuel read this poem.


While my mother lies in a hospital
room tethered to the earth by the guy
wires of two IVs, I run the streets
trying to take charge of my left leg
which veers lightly outward
and to the left: it is a leg lost
to first position and part of the general
malfunction: the flicker of the mitral
valve within the echocardiogram,
the scuffed derma that presages
the cells' rage, the snare the skin
has thrown over me, gristle
of the skull more prominent,
the hair draining from my head.

The hair draining from my head.
I run the streets at night,
sighs sough through the sieve of me.
My thoughts turn to dry ice.
In my left eye the ghost of a cataract,
Edward Hopper in my right,
his poisonous furnishings.
Where thoughts once were:
an antiseptic smoke.

I run while shutting first one
eye then the other. My left
eye grips, handle by handle,
the objects in their windows,
flowers on the lip of sill.

My right eye wobbles drunkenly.
Rooms close their shutters,
but my right eye is a lamp. Silent
and greedy. The lid drops its curtain,
smothers its sight, so now the left eye
mothers me among the shadows.

So weary with the weight of me
my breath could not, could not,
could not, could not, nor lips,
nor knees. The hard dark
is padlocked with a huge heart
no place to put a key nor lock
nor unlock.

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