A Brightening
Your body is my condition,
a last redoubt.
It is time to get cracking,
to crack on with this dying.
A stranger knocks at the front door,
asks suspiciously if we are redirecting her mail.
My father’s strong hands are a small
history of labour.
Oil, dust, the blue vein at the wrist.
Each night he clips a small device to his finger
to test his oxygen levels. Sometimes over 90
others languishing in the low 80s.
Each night he offers it to me breathlessly
- your turn.
In the order of dying the body refuses food.
And then water.
There is nothing else to be done
but wait.
A TV brought into the room
distracts from death’s angled mien,
the half covered mirror at the end of the bed.
John Wayne and a drunk sheriff to keep us company
El Dorado or Rio Bravo
Never mind we have seen both before,
they are better relief than blue drops under the tongue.
At night two of my sisters sleep beside him
alert to his coughing, his stillness.
In the morning red eyed they lie,
yeah yeah we slept.
In the last month, my father resurrected a wristwatch
as a present. A kind of heirloom, I guess.
Good mechanics he assured me.
Paid the watchmaker to clean it,
replace the battery, adjust the strap.
Every morning from his bed he asks
What’s the time?
and I instinctively look at my phone,
disappointing him. Next time, Dad, I tell him,
touching the face. Next time.
The hospice nurses speak gentle words
as if language could bruise the skin.
Wash and shave, hot towels, clean pyjamas.
You are slowly making way, making your own
sure passage into a figure of speech.
Have you noticed no one says dying anymore?
They murmur slipping away or passing
as though death were fragile
as though saying its real name
would shatter life’s glass
But I am wishing you dead, dad, that I will wake
and you will be gone, your face relaxed
into death, your chest no longer heaving to breathe
through this painless/painful letting go.
An admission that this sack of body
lets us all down in the end.
Teeth, lungs, shrivelled legs - the worn pieces
are still part of living’s engine
and refuse to shut down.
Put a pillow over my head
You whispered last night - why can’t I die?
One evening we sang him the old songs -
Galway Shawl, Moonshiner, Me Auld Skilara Hat.
He seemed to listen, opened his eyes for a moment,
scanned us all, and grumbled - my feet are cold!
But later Pat Delaney reminded him,
What was that song you used to sing? she asked.
And his eyes opened and he sang
Oh, If I was a blackbird
could whistle and sing
I’d follow the vessel
my true love sails in
Our mother, dead these five years,
watching from the opposite wall.
Every night I take out his hearing aids
tuck him into bed, say goodnight
and touch his shoulder. Later I watch him
sleeping through his final dreams,
the last man of his generation.
His hands resting on the sheets
like folded tools.
Hands that make tiny voyages
between sheet and skin,
searching for something already wired.
This morning after days of semi-consciousness
you woke, Lazarus eyes wide, smiled hello,
and made a joke about raising the dead,
raising the hospice bed.
The variable pressure mattress
floating you gently on its pale pink sea.
We are exhausted looking for death
in our father’s rising chest, the colour of his face,
the way his breath grows shallow, stops,
then kicks in again.
Tonight a sudden blackness.
A power outage - dad whispering
breathlessly from his deathbed:
the location of the keys (horse-head key rack),
fusebox, mains switch.
Then silence.
A slow untethering…
it is midnight or thereabouts.
A soft rattle in your chest
a minute’s long pause
then you leave.
Body of water, body of air.
The world briefly opening, then closing again.
Redirecting your mail.
In some cultures, birds are invited
to family weddings or funerals
and given a piece of cake,
a saucer of honey-soaked bread.
The day after the funeral, my second sister
calls urgently from the kitchen.
A black bird
flown in through an open window
dancing across the living room carpet.
Turns its head towards the mantle piece,
then gone.
Leaving us with the same
dismantled afternoon,
same metal taste of absence.
The same slow brightening of sky.
Brian Flaherty is co-founder of the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre with Michele Leggott, and was co-editor of the poetry journal Trout. Poems have appeared in Turbine, Best NZ Poems, Blackmail Press, Ika, and Ka Mate Ka Ora. Plague Poems was published by Little Island Press in 2021. Recordings of some of his poetry are at Six Pack Sound.
