And you yourself – what do you know?

Driving, you beseeched your own dead

to accompany you through this night

Prayer and hiss of a hot

stove mind speeding on the highway

Like a fish-eye camera you find your lover stiff

sitting in the car

  four stories below,

as close as she can get to a disease

  that allows only two people in the room

to say goodbye to a father

And that, only for minutes.

Her mother and brother already inside

Shapes move in high hospital windows

And she, called the strong one, sits below

Saying goodbye from the driver’s seat, side-street vigil.

The whole soundless landscape under the clouded or clear sky

And then you, you arrive in the middle of it all carrying uselessly

a Tupperware full of roasted root vegetables

Your grandmother: People always forget to eat

Until the nurse relents and lets her

  in, her wide eyes her sweater flapping

  The hallway leading in

The only true thing being the vertical motion:

The breaths

of life

and death

cold car

and the moon

shining down.

Listen to the night, scooping and hollowing out

strange staticky silence between the seconds

and the beep of other cars locking

and other people holding each other bent over

  wading through the still life night

  in pairs and alone.

  there is the moon,

  too bright

there is this triangle:

Her Her father

and you

When we love a sap older than time rises through our arms.

And then she returns, swimming

in a dark prehistory:

your hands the car

  (empty) (cold and dark)

Her breath

  (bereft)

and him somewhere above