new poems

Apparently, I am trying to process my grandfather's waning health. I saw him over the break, you know. I think his time is coming, or ending. I suppose he has had a lot of it (time)-- more than 90 years. But it is never enough. In recent writing sessions, these two poems have come, and surprised me in their coming. So I suppose these are my thoughts on the matter.
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One

He lies in the bright yellow lamplight

of the bedroom, all night

fearing the darkness

in a wakeful state, or fearing sleep—

its similarity to death

creeping day by day

like a spider into his heart.

He is never alone.

In the awkward spaces

he presses his ear to the wall, waiting

for the sounds of another world—

the saxophone squeal of doors closing,

and the desolate crash of dishes

being put away in the kitchen.

Beside his heart

in the empty cavern of his chest

rests a web of tiny wires just below the skin—

a metal box built to shock

a rhythm into his heart,

the doors of its four chambers

opened and slammed shut too many times;

they have come unhinged.

The threads of nerve and muscle

are loose, like a hem come undone.

And we wait for the time

when the thin red walls will fall,

and all the rooms of the heart

will once again be one.

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Somehow Vegetables

Somehow vegetables came,

purple promises planted years ago and rising

in a backwards wilt across the garden—

shiny eggplants, yellow squash,

and the bulbous beginnings

of a pumpkin.

How the colors twisted from the ground,

waxy vines and fuzzy leaves,

and how they twisted down, the tomatoes

curled in on themselves with the exuberance of unchecked growth,

until the red pulp of their lives spilled out—

like a heart with too much blood—

the golden seeds slipping from their neat chambers

into the darkened soil

to start again.

While the man who planted them

lies still, the pocket of his body empty

beneath the earth. He has been deseeded,

each organ lifted carefully

out of the hollow of his chest.

Now his palms rest,

upturned like dried leaves,

waiting to cup the sky.

Caroline E. Mann, 2008.

Note: this is about my granddad, I think… imagining what will happen when he dies… that perhaps someone new will move into their house and his garden will rise up like a zombie, untended to, and the new neighbor won’t know the source of the miracle… but will observe it in its crooked reaching all the same. And I’m contrasting the resurgence of gardens, I suppose, with the finality of human life… how we do not have seeds, do not exactly regrow… but I guess live on in our deeds, in what we plant.