LAZARUS II
Two summers ago
In the black night of Brooklyn
I
A sixty-nine year old man spewed blood
Into the bathroom tub, a lot of blood__
After wiping the retch
From my face
More spew, more blood, liters of blood red red red
Something not right
Something very wrong
And I went back to sleep
Planning to go to a hospital
If I make the morn__
At dawn
I crossed the East River
Not in an amubulance
In a taxi
To a 1st Avenue hospital
Inside the emergency room
The staff take one look
A scrum of nurses, orderlies, and doctors speed my body from ER to OR
Hands strip my old body naked
“Sir, can you hear me?
A young intern
Nod
“You are bleeding to death from the varices.”
“Varices?”
“Small stomach fissures."
A nod
"Do you have family in New York?”
Head shake from side to side
“Do you want to be revived?”
“From the dead?”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”___
An oxygen mask
Over my mouth and nose
“If you have any prayers, say them.”
“Síoraíocht.”
The Celtic word for eternity
No meaning to Christians
Their only afterlifes
Heaven hell or purgatory__
None of that now
The hiss of oxygen, anesthesia
Propofol
Me
Into a Limbo
White light
Nothing, only white
There was something else___
Eternal nothingness
Síoraíocht times zero equals zero
Death
Eternity
I was cool with nothing__
And then I was back
Life
The waking eternity
Here
Pain
The Here not my own bed__
Their hospital
The pain mine.
None of this a dream
Sucked air
The other patient in the room
Not breathing
Never again
Lost to eternity___
Me
Hospital
Nurses
Doctors
An earnest doctor reading a chart
“You were very lucky. We stopped the bleeding.”
“I like luck.”
Ahd in Gaelic
“I have bad news.”
Plenty of bad news__
Cancer
Cirrhosis
The looming threat of death
My forever death's eternity__
I 69
Alone in a hospital bed
In a city of millions
Bad news
It was all right
I had had a grand life__
And I was not dead yet
Still alive
Straddling eternity and nothing
No fear for the past, present or future or nothing__
I had died before
Car crashes
Beatings
Broken hearts
Whatever didn’t kill me
Made me wish I was__
In the following weeks my friends thought this was the end
Some saw death in my eyes
My children in Thailand prayed to Buddha My wives too
That I will live forever
People believed in life eternal
In Heaven, Limbo,or Hell
I had believed the same
As a child
Not now
But I had had a good life___
New England, New York, California, England, France, Germany, Hawaii, Quebec, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, China, Nepal, Tibet, Kenya, Tanzania, and Belize, Guatamala, Honduras, Peru, Jamaica
How can I forget India, the Ganges at dawn?
The burning bodies with a sitarb raga drifting on the smoke from a ghat temple
Friends by the thousands
Two family in Thailand
Five children
Two grandchildren
A good life__
But I was not dead
Still alive
Straddling eternity
Why fight for life?
Why not accept this fate?
Acceptance
Surrender
Freedom__
Morphine made surrender easy
Free
Never to drink again__
And there was still more to come___
Months passed
A year and more
Pain, jaundice, weight loss
Down to 142 pounds
People thought
I looked like a Rolling Stone
Keith Richards___
Ahead my last days
Fly to Thailand
Watch the sun set
Over the emerald green rice fields
My family by my side
Loaded on morphine__
Then a miracle__
Yulemas
An available transplant.
That night back in the OR
The room cuts to black
Clear light
I know this Limbo well
No gods, no heaven, no hell
Nowhere
Nothing
No one
The embrace of eternity
Escape from the white light
A detour
To London
The Smithfield Market Slaughterhouse
My body on a chopping block
Entrails scattered across the wood
Then snap back to life This life__
Sniff the air
Antiseptic smell
The gore of the abattoir gone
Clean sheets
The machines beep
A nurse gave me water
Tasting of life
My fingers touch
A black scar
Marking the execution of the old me.
A new me alive
Alive with another soul within me
Paula My donor
Forty years old
300 pounds
A suicide
I love her and she me
Old School Lazarus II
Where’s the morphine?__
From the white propofol extinction
Back from the Smithfield Market Slaughterhouse
Back to the eternity__
The new me
In a hospital bed
High over the East River
Not alone
Just Paula and Lazarus II
Wicked scars
Never dead before my time
Only dead to the time before now
Now a gray winter sky o’er Brooklyn
Time eternal
Because there is no time in nothingness
Only Nothing Paula and Lazarus II__
We are not lonely together
Living forever again
Remember from whence thee came and where we’re going
Ashes to Ashes not___
poetry lives with me. this poem has gone through many metamorphosis. Every time I read or recite it, the poem spawns newness with the previously unseen. Always alive like me and Paula and eternity and Síoraíocht__
