Get There at 10:00 So You Won’t Have to Stay for Lunch     There’s nothing the doctor can do but make you comfortable enough to ask yourself what’s next, what was that he said.               All the beer we drank and enjoyed, slouched on a flat sea, lurching our heads to guzzle.  Your right hand brought to mouth, then left, one after the other, over and again. You’re a thousand-armed slug-faced god of compassion, soft tomato on the window sill. Light from light, true god from true god, absolute zero.  There’s nothing to say but we keep talking. Your daughter and her husband, his Denver Broncos baseball cap, Broncos jersey (Terrell Davis replica), his jeans draped like loose tarp.  The two of them holding hands, afraid of each other.  High on a ledge, the gaps between our words blown around like a tin can.  This is when we remember your next appointment’s in two weeks. If mom were alive, she’d call the doctor a babalak, someone who sits around and does nothing. Two nipping dogs stare down the grandson’s ginger step and nuzzle.  You’re right, it’s lonely upstairs.  Down here, living room and your sofa bed, people are alive and smoldering and glad to wave their arms at the television when they talk.     Originally published in With the Memory, Which is Enormous (Main Street Rag Press, 2009)     “The man who holds miracles to be ceased puts it out of his own power to ever witness one.”*     He weaves in and out of traffic in his bed.  No median strip to go half-way, worn paint where lane markers used to be.  There’s a tube inside my brother and he can’t get dog hair in it.   Get him magazine subscriptions so he can pass the time.   Drip bags on trash pickup day, sirens, he can be left home alone today, his mail doesn’t have to be opened, his hands in someone’s palms. Miracles feel like sun on an oiled head.   Get him computer games.   Don’t let the dogs in when he’s doing dialysis.                They gave him 10 months             and the room came alive.             Bed post, pitcher of water,             empty vase just washed,             a Cleveland Plain Dealer.   The kidney specialist is a miracle who studies the Otis Elevators of the body and barters a few more years for him.   When the specialist left the room, I added comments to his medical chart, substituted words like “stigma” for “eye,” changed phrases such as “he is poor and independent” to “my brother is poor and unemployed except by his own Energy.”     Originally published in With the Memory, Which is Enormous (Main Street Rag Press, 2009) *Title is from William Blake’s annotations to Bishop Watson’s An Apology for the Bible. Final four lines adapted from Blake’s annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds.       Then She Threw the Norman Vincent Peale Book at My Head     My brother sure his wife was fucking the woman upstairs. I brought Lee, my girlfriend, to see their new baby.  We just graduated from high school & lived on a houseboat on Lake Erie.  Helped them hang a mobile after dinner, hand-drawn Big Bird hunched like a yellow hawk.  They played Mozart, speakers next to crib to pucker up the room . . . We all drank too much & argued about the woman upstairs who once said their dog, lying sideways on the floor, looked just like the state of Texas.  Lee was scared . . . that same squint smile when her mother put saltpeter in her father’s venison -- holding my hand to stop from shaking.  The things I knew . . . going off to journalism school even though I called myself a communist & of course the Soviets censored everything you couldn’t nail to the floor.  They trained their German Shepherd to growl at anyone dark-skinned, & I knew they beat each other, & the woman upstairs knew it, too.  My brother pushed his wife into a glass door last summer, so she swung her purse, a brick inside, & busted his kneecap.  A softball injury, he said.  Everyone’s secrets:  Lee cut herself, burned her arms with cigarettes, & I wanted to be the best communist journalist in America.  My brother rolled a joint.  Everyone relaxed.  Even Lee loosened her grip.  He looked away every time his wife said anything . . . She said she wanted to give me a graduation gift.  Traffic hissed through the screens.  Drunk, she grabbed a book off her shelf, The Power of Positive Thinking.  Red binding chipped.  I didn’t need it. I was going to college.  It wasn’t a gift -- she just pulled it from the shelf & pretended she bought it.               Originally published in With the Memory, Which is Enormous (Main Street Rag Press, 2009)         © Tony Trigilio