I have to sew my memories
inside the lining of my coat
to keep them close but not inside,

something to take on and off
when cold grief needs warm reflection
or remembrances flash painfully bright,

when chemo and radiation
makes it difficult to feel my teeth,
tie my shoes, retrieve the hem of a future

through the barbed-wire fence of past life,
the cancer, the bad brother that shoves me
through, leaving me bloodied and betrayed

but safer in the ways of nothingness,
the death of my bawling infant self
that I just begin to fathom.

I lack the humility to pray for less,
just close my eyes and find kindness
for the coats I sew for others in the dark.

I am grateful for those strangers
who carry my grief in kindness,
those who shoulder it with no thought,
just a sharp awareness of the ache of death
whirling inside as I balance between
cancer and despair, the wondering of the
value of a cure in a world becoming corpse.

They pull me away from myself with
nurses’ caresses,  children smiles,
those few  holding the glass door
open until I pass the threshold
while they sing quietly to themselves,
all Atlases bearing milliseconds of ache
in the chain of Christ’s example.

I have called them and they have called me,
kindness birthing kindness, rearing kindness,
each reaching towards, backwards, forwards,
determined to keep me from myself
and the the temptation to step off the edge
that calls me and them, all knowing that Atlas  
never had  the solace of conquering death.

His arms were too short to box with God,
so God sent him down for more sparring.

He boxed the devil over and over and over,
the Father, Son, Holy Spirit doing the scoring.

When he beat the devil every round,
he tried again to punch the Lord.

His arm were still too short to reach His chin,
though this time he lasted about a round.

God sent him down again to box the sin of man,
Jesus needing a break from all that jive.

When he broke even he died and went to heaven,
spoiling for a rematch with the holy Lord.

At the pearly gates he landed a blow on Jesus’ chin
knocking a tooth out to a thousand clouds.

Jesus picked himself up from the canvas of heaven.
He smiled at him.  “Good fight”, he said.

What does a dog
know of being a wolf,
a wolf know of being a dog?

The wolf howls not
to understand the moon
but to know itself
in the community of nature,

to shout out
its place in the pack
and among the stars.

It knows hunger that
a dog will never know,
the desperation of the hunt,
and not a master’s command.

The wolf tastes the blood
of squirrel and rabbit,
the death of prey and
not the dream of it.

The wolf fears the spark,
the scent of the two foot,
the sound of its silver shout.

The dog knows its leash,
the comfort of the hearth,
the happy dreams that
come with a full stomach,

the fetch of a duck in its mouth
and not its curor,
the squeak of velveteen prey.

Even the dingo of the bush
scavenges for its food and
maybe dreams of human kindness
and living beneath his beams.

The dog shelters with him
and does not swelter
in the fury of the sun.

The dog knows God
through the hand of man.
The wolf knows no God
and scorns its inverted pet.

The wolf needs not good dogs.
It need only to be a good or bad wolf,
to heed the call of the wild.

What keeps me holding onto my old self,
preventing me from casting it into past swells?

Something detested, adored, hymned too,
haunted, cancer ridden, inflamed, grieving

and torn- yet beloved, pulled forward
into an ocean of tomorrow and tomorrow’s

swimming to hope or drowning in hopelessness,
never knowing where my forgiveness exists

or where my identity will be marooned,
my crueler self will  beach

and be rescued or
die in the unlit sun.

The hospital gown they gave me
is the same one with clouds
my mother and friend once wore,
a hand me down filled
with the aura of grief and hope,
of time and death.

My name and date of birth
are the only thing the nurses ask
as I am led to the mold
in a treatment room
filled with a halogen haze
and an all encompassing white-
almost a verisimilitude of heaven-
pulled and pushed to the mean
that is marked in black on my body,
strapped in and slid to the center.

The  mechanical eye
revolves around me three times,
a trinity of hope, despair, life,
as I listen to bagpipes humming around,
the brightness forcing my eyes closed,
the wave tingling as it passes underneath.

I am connected to the past
by the fear of death,
separated through
the hope of cure,
knowing that I won’t
die in the gown of my mother
or with a four inch hole on my back
like my friend.

The eye whirls slowly around
one more time, then stops,
barely ten minutes passing
in an eternity of thoughts.

The nurses offer me curved arms
that lift me up, allow me
to swing my legs over
and touch the floor,
my backside exposed,
as I raise myself up
and walk away, death dates
of loved ones haunting my brain,
seeing only the ashes of clouds
of myself and others around me.

I can’t remember when death
turned moments to memorial,
gifts unfolded to blessings.

The tan slippers of Christmas past
snuggled my mother’s lost toe
so the others never mourned.

Those mules never left her feet,
even on her final nap.
“Bless me Papa,” her last words.

I don’t know if they were lost
or she was buried with them.
I thought they were forever gone.

And then twenty three years on
I gifted my friend some pair
my new wife found on last sale.

She wore them, a sacrament
to  follow from home to ward
bequeathed from last breath

thru the fragile bruise of time,
the visions of Christ near her,  
repeating deliriums

of cold, cold, cold: hot, hot, hot
and I love you, I love yous
until lost in all the moves

from ICU to hospice,
unable to find others,
a new fleshy blanket I

draped around her cold/hot feet,
until it snuggled just so right,  
perfect as a thank you.

Five days after Thanksgiving
she passed away and I took
the cloth home to wash and wear

to find my wife had found it
and regifted what I could
not own to her sleeping soul.