I did not enjoy the salad bar at the hospital café
steering me to a calm that never arrived.
The act of ferrying between hospice visits
gave us something to do, that felt like doing something.
Soon we’d touched too hard the nature of things.
It bit like an arthritic cat, like a jab it bit—
it bit like mercy, which was the lesser evil.
Our choices were all bad ones we’d have to think about
for days after the fact; here was the always and never
of letting go. I was mostly alone with my brain,
its ability to forget like blacking out at parties
on the birthdays of the dead. I never went to the graves
on my visits home and if there was a home, dissolve it—
let it be salt and ash, let it be silt and river.