Near-Life Experience Poem by Will Thomas

Near-Life Experience

Rating: 5.0


'And then the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little-less-nothing. And that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
were not the ones dead, turned to their affairs.'
-Robert Frost

[A less literary prologue, an old joke
often attributed to Groucho Marx:
Doctor comes into the hospital room
to tell his patient that somehow
the wrong leg has been amputated
and that the other will have to be removed.
'I've got good news
and bad news, '
says the doc.
'The bad news is that your other leg
has to go.
The good news is that the guy in the bed
next to yours wants to buy your slippers.']

Slowly-
For these purposes
the very word seems
not nearly slow enough.

Perhaps this:
the fluttering pulse of the dying,
the interminable pauses
between fading heartbeats
and final scraping breaths.

Something this faint, this pale,
the soul's murmur,
the immeasurable fineness
and shuddering fragility
of the caul.

This,
this is me,
this is I,
sitting up
and taking nourishment,
halting survivor
of an emotional stroke,
a prolonged loss of oxygen
to the heart.

Learning again
(at what is now clearly
and inexorably
a glacial pace)
the first syllables of hope,
the bare and basic syntax
of tomorrow.

All prognoses,
all diagnoses
now revealed,
in this, the fourth year
of hurtful healing,
to be, at best,
benignly optimistic,
and,
at the very worst,
destructively delusional.

And so,
a mid-course correction,
as last night,
in the sheltering early darkness
of mid-November,
I walk quietly to the end
of what had once been our driveway,
look back
at what had once been
our house.
My eyes light on my new front porch,
now bearing only two pumpkins,
a wreath of curling autumnal leaves,
and a whimsical doormat
that reads, 'Go Away.'

In the cocooning nightfall,
I look back at my home.

I do not cry.

COMMENTS OF THE POEM
Sulaiman Mohd Yusof 25 March 2008

hi will................fantasticos.................thats the right word for you..pal.

0 0 Reply
READ THIS POEM IN OTHER LANGUAGES
Close
Error Success