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Jonathan Moya May 2022
Only my grandmother came home to die.
Her centuries old home was built
with a birthing and dying room,
two small bedrooms, a library
and as was custom, no parlor

She went through the process of life
in private but away from the spaces
entirely reserved for birth and death.

Home was a place where she ate,
sat still, stared and meditated
day after day at the place where she
came from and would finally end up.
That was the way it was suppose to be.

On that day, she sat in her old mahogany
birthing chair and closed her eyes
until they no longer fluttered.
Her hand fell on what was my mother’s
old crib, rocking it three times.  
She was moved to the smaller room
long prepared for her body.
Her dying room had no light,
just a small bed with fluffy pillows.

My mother was a living woman.
When she bought her Miami house
near the beach and the bay
she made certain there were
no birthing and dying spaces,
just lots and lots of living areas:
four bedrooms, a sunken living room
that took more than half the space,
a well-breathed kitchen, a good size
open Florida room and beyond that
a screened-in clear blue pool
equal to the size of the living room.
This was the way she knew it was
suppose to be for her and for us.

She died on a flesh covered La-Z-Boy
in the TV-room of a much smaller house,
the arm rest worn through by constant
gripping, the foot rest half kicked off from
the convulsion prior to the hear attack.
I had just returned from seeing
Fatal Attraction at the mall Megaplex.
Thirty-five years later I’ve yet to rewatch it.

My father must have been thinking of his death
when he built his open house atop the charred ruins
of a post Civil War estate with servant quarters and
stables that overlooked Frenchman’s Cove in Maine.
The house was a wing cut from the air and
nailed to the rocky shore. The gentle waters of the bay
ached daily to caress the sighing foundation beneath
as if the water and air always knew and was now
retelling the story of every birth and death in the
front and back spaces  of  their proper time.
My father  found peace there and  called it Tranquility.
But the soil and tide knew from the soft screech
of the sky that he would be denied his wish to die there.  

My father, a doctor, specialized in obstetric anesthesia,
and started his.practice just on the fringe when
birthing rooms were yielding to maternity wards.
On a bright day in his study overlooking the bay,
when he stared looking like he might be
turning the corner on a recent malady,
he turned pale and gray and short of breath.
He was passed from smaller hospital
to bigger hospital until he finally landed
in the University hospital where he taught
for many years, in a private room amidst
the throbbing and beeping of machines
he was intimately comfortable with.

On his second day in hospice, the machines
where disconnected and under the lightest
of anesthetic drugs he took his last sleep.
The interns said it was an honor
to treat him until his last dying breath.

I don’t know if I will pass in a dying room
of my choosing.  it will certainly be far
removed from the room I was born.
Most likely I will die in the wrong place,
like most everyone else. As you have
read, the odds are less than one in three.
that nature or fate or God will get it right.  

Time is too much about different
arrangements of proximity to be relied on.
So much depends on who goes in front of me.
Who is besides me and/or behind me.
Or just elsewhere, missing, soon to come.
it all depends on how attenuated I am
to the living and dying spaces around me.
How undoubtedly some one else
or no one will write or even remember
my ending and beginning
Jonathan Moya May 2022
The oceans recede,
its pylons exposed.
The great elephants rust
in the junkyard they fell
when Chukwa shifted.
Even his severed legs
can’t hold up the earth-sky.
The sea grass stiffens
to a verdant wave,
curl exposing the horizon.
The ivory house
built on the beach
(the one with the
bench in back
where children played
and the family picnicked,
the one with the
red flame corvette idling
on the cracked street)
disassembles in the winds.

The "world-elephants" are mythical animals which appear in Hindu cosmology. The Amarakosha (5th century) lists the names of eight male elephants bearing the world (along with eight unnamed female elephants).  They sit atop Chukwa, the Cosmic Tutrtle
Jonathan Moya May 2022
it’s easy to know where the leaves were before they fell,
what her lips tasted after the caress of the loving hand,
what was in the crib  rusting in the forest of the night.

Only the twins know why they nod to each in the fog,
the thing  the hound bays for in the lake of stars,
what the alligators devoured in their circling frenzy—

the fattened beast
that exists bleeding
from the barn’s rafters.
Jonathan Moya May 2022
If you accept the apple
you must accept the bite,
the lips that bit the flesh,
the legs that climbed the tree,
the eyes that looked and lusted
for what was in between and above
the white cleft rising in the speckled light,
all the crucifixes after and the rising flags since.
Jonathan Moya May 2022
In Vatican City a cardinal walks
resolutely forward, his red train
flowing behind longer than a bride’s.

It’s silhouette passes by the open
windows of the atelier reflecting
crosses over the bodices of the
tailor’s latest scarlet creations.

Another black smoke day rises from
the chimney of the Sistine Chapel.

Blood shadows slowly abandon
St. Peter’s square for the trek home.

The sun’s golden trail will soon yield
to the purple plush of a Roman night.

its spectral color will caress the shoulders
of the woman with the straw hat and
black dress wanting to dance in the Trevi;

the black suit businessman ignoring
his even blacker shadow cast on
the terra cotta wall of his dextral side;

the young mother nursing her infant in
the safe T between ***** and clavicle,
praying to the priest behind the screen.
Jonathan Moya May 2022
Two circles, two triangles locked in against a rail
exist as geometries of mobility in immobility,
movement stuck in a silence never intended.

The front wheel swings in the direction of desire,
forward progress the only direction it knows.
Yet, it seems impossible that it stays upright.

Without a kick stand it falls easily into the dust.
Without a peddler executing a delicate balance
it wobbles aimlessly, an unguided wild thing.
  
Four wheelers, existing in a heaviness
that can’t be toppled over, cough gray
exhaust smoke on its fragile wheels.

It would fly if it could flap, if it had wings
but it can only roll and roll and roll,
its rider keeping enough speed for a breeze.

Only the rider ponders that they can’t fly.
the machine only knows its movement.
Color is their expression, not of itself

Pink wheels, a red crank and grips
adorned with blue streamers await
the daughter in elementary school.

Handlebars like a longhorn’s skull,
black wheels and a leather toe clip-
the boy who lives to pop wheelie’s.

Gold resting on solid yellow wheels,
an elongated seat in cheetah print-
a speedy courier dodging traffic.

Gray on a sensible, sturdy frame,
a black padded seat, a frame basket
in front- a matron grocery shopping.

All wait for the lock to unclick,
be wrapped under the seat, the
rider to turn it around and move.
Jonathan Moya May 2022
When the color goes away for the day
the night beach revels in the shadows play.
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