Poem Therapy at 1:50 P.M. - Deborah Diggs

Deborah Digges

Trapeze
Deborah Digges

See how the first dark takes the city in its arms
and carries it into what yesterday we called the future.

O, the dying are such acrobats.
Here you must take a boat from one day to the next,

or clutch the girders of the bridge, hand over hand.
But they are sailing like a pendulum between eternity and evening,

diving, recovering, balancing the air.
Who can tell at this hour seabirds from starlings,

wind from revolving doors or currents off the river.
Some are as children on swings pumping higher and higher.

Don't call them back, don't call them in for supper.
See, they leave scuff marks like jet trails on the sky.

My father is a passenger on the boat, clutching at the girders swinging between the present and the future. To say I am in denial, is an understatement. Monday, I took the day off work, and once he was aware of this, he came for coffee in the morning, Coke in the afternoon: our summer routine. Over Cokes he said he had a secret, which if you know my father, is impossible. The secret is that he has a new pain in his back and he's certain it's the cancer, his gremlins. Although his psa numbers are down due to his medications, the bone cancer is here to stay. It's in his bones.

In his bones. I've said this so many time when speaking of him over the years. The soil is in his bones, his temper is in his bones, his stubbornness is in his bones. Now it's something else. The man is 82, so it's likely age will get him before the gremlins, but the certainty is unsettling.