Talking to my fetches

Destination is the trivialest thing
in this torrent of thisness,
thisness in an all too sunny place.

Under a gooey sheet of fentanyl schedule becomes an unseemly word,
nowhere's an alluring face.

The garden fence of words gives way to invasive species,
loosestrife, chaos and misunderstanding.

I'm tired of proving I'm not like this face.

It doesn't matter. I'd tell you how I know
but it would take forever just to end in the closing of a motel. 

I'd tell all you daft people, in all your accents,
tartans, hijabs, burnooses, loinclothes, suits and ties,
one after another, when all I really wanted was to be as daft as you.

I grew up in a the embrace of the great unsaid
and thought I might as well be dead.

The whole Western novel depends on a desperate girl
and an old loony tilting at windmills. 

I was more scholarly about windows than arithmetic
and wished the sultan had strangled Scheherazade.

I looked up at the ceiling and smiled
and the whole world burst into stars.

Who the hell was I to say anything more?
I can't even pick up my socks off the floor.

Crowding in, faces I misjudged, and juggling
left of whatever's happening, wearing shreds of whatever happened
when we encountered each other—

fetches to whom I've had to go unready in an ambulance
and now am understood. 

There's no justice for love at death's door,
the urgency of its indecent ambush.

Its invitation to within seems hustle
and yet there is scent of redolence.

When was there ever an accounting for this darkening moment
that didn't seem ungracious or a lightfooted reason?

Tired of this sadness and song, this shuttlling and dicking around,
this changing face to fit my name, tired and dying as theater,
ninety years comes down to this tussle
for a comfortable position to die
in a room brightly lit for someone else.

I say  it thinking of Tolstoy sitting in a railroad station,
ticket already punched, having seen much more
than any czar or general.

——————

I began writing these reflections in the emergency room at Westchester Medical Center where I was taken for a dangerous infection. I may, if I live that long, revisit them and attempt to make of them a more coherent poem, but I think they have an urgent energy, an edge, worth recording as they came to me in the emergency room, then the surgery, and then my hospital room.