Poems to Honor and Console
My most recent publication is “The Goodbye Skin,” which just appeared in the Ars Erotica issue of Perfume River Poetry Review. Editor Vuong Quoc Vu has selected poems of great sensitivity and beauty to include in this issue about love. I very much enjoy his own poetry as well as the poems he chooses to include in his publications. Much of his heart is still with his native country of Vietnam.
We write best about what our hearts are most drawn toward. Therefore many of mine involve people I have cared for as a nurse. By crafting a poem for these people I feel that I honor them and console myself. It is not easy to witness suffering, but necessary not to look away. Below is my poem.
The Goodbye Skin
She asks to lie beside him for an
hour, just an hour, before earth claims him
and the smoky wind. I see her
climb onto the bed that for weeks
had housed nerve endings so brittle
the air seemed to bleed. No
he had screamed when she reached out
to touch him. Today his stillness is accepting
as she curls against stiff limbs. I leave
the room, closing the door softly, taping up
a makeshift sign so that no worker
on a pleasureless schedule interrupts a passion
beyond intimacy or tear. Is it possible
to reach the dead? Minutes or years later? To
beg the breeze for a fingertip or sun for the burn
of cheek against cheek? Is this what heaven
becomes: loving once again a skin
not our own? I do not see
her leave, but by the end of the shift
the room is empty, ragged cocoon. On the naked
mattress only indentations remain: head,
shoulders, buttocks, heels and next to this:
the curve of a hip bone.
(Tourane Poetry Press, P.O. Box 2192, Cupertino, CA 95015-2192)