Lit up for the Christmas Party,
Neck strung with colored flashing bumps,
Small and flashy, face shivering with wrinkles
but maybe not that old, just skin leaden with travel,
Elaine has been everywhere:
Writing small plays promoting condoms in Burma and Uganda and Ethiopia;
Sailing and cooking on the Mediterranean;
Living in Venice;
And now, with a three-month rental in New York,
learning to paint geometrically constructed nudes.
"I don't like landscapes."
The night before, she told me, her hosts were out and she went onto the deck into ice-driven blunt December.
The door behind her whispered "lock".
Windows pressed shut, neighbors as far as buoys in a wind-wracked sea, no way in.
But the extra car was open.
For 50 minutes till her friends came home, she sat inside, humming yoga breath,
In out in out in out.
"I was very Zen."
Then, vibrating to the party, she glitters away on tick ticking feet, a gyre whirling in place until the center fails to hold.
December 17, 2018
Old Killick,
Fur plating his back with stegosaurus shards, can't clean, can't eat,
All bones flattened on a chair.
He must be dying.
I empathize. Neither of us are telling time anything right now.
I pet him. Sad, sad, all things pass.
Then off to the vet and out comes his bad tooth.
By midday he is off his chair, eating again, and complaining if dinner is late.
Betrayed, I'm the only one dying now.
December 18, 2018
A fellow volunteer, 86 years old, a cane beneath one hand, props Xmas clichés -- plastic holly, ivy, wreathes-- in neon clusters at the tables' ends,
Certain to cheer the gray and mottled diners later on.
In the kitchen, where I'm cooking, we hug, then back tap our way apart.
"I fell in the bathroom last week." A growly voice with a smoker's burr. "On the floor for twenty hours. First on my back, then I pulled my way to the wall and sat for the rest of time. I could hear the phone ring."
"Who found you."
"My son in law, thank god."
We talk of our mutual joint pain, worthless analgesics, Internet cures untried, Christmas.
"What are you going to do?"
"See my kids and visit my sister."
As she leaves, she gives me a kiss that smells of mother's powder.
It never happened before. So she knows too.
December 19
My friend's brother has multiple dystrophy. His beautiful, far younger, wife-- "I want someone to grow old with--" has taken up with two millionaires and wants to go to Africa with one, along with their two girls.
He believes she'll blacken both her eyes and pretend abuse so she can grab them. He is shattered and dying.
Mid-forties is the crazy girl time before invisibility, sexual Godzillas stomping on children and men. Been there.
My former husband after my diagnosis, sent me books to read.
My last husband is here. How did I get so lucky?
December 20
Metastastis confirmed. Ten years gone, my friend, sitting in a Tuscany sun, slides beneath my search for trials, saving my screen but not herself. Her death was an exhale and her hand on mine, a release. Soon, when sitting against a wall or in a car or boney on a chair, I will be breathing in and breathing out, breathing in and breathing out.
