On Rumpled Sheets You curl on rumpled sheets, your wispy hair a halo on the pillow. Outside your hospital room, carts rattle by as a Code Blue comes over the intercom. Inside, monitors beep, recording your breath, your beating heart. Gently, I place my warm hand on yours, over the tape tethering you to IV tubing, and ask if you still want the weak tea on your food tray, or whether I should bring you some lemon sorbet—one of the few things you can still get down. But no, you want to sleep now. As night darkens the sky outside your window, there is no corresponding dark inside. The fluorescent sun never sets. that sick girl on my childhood street— her face flickers   © Penny Harter. Published in print and on-line in Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose.            From Recycling Starlight, in-press with Mountains & Rivers Press, 2010.   -------------------------------------   In the ICU, October, 2008 You ask if there’s a window anywhere. Behind your bed, the room’s only window opens on yellow leaves and morning sky. Bring me a mirror tomorrow, you demand. You take the mirror in your tethered hand and slowly angle it as you seek proof that you are still alive and still on Earth. And then you briefly contemplate your face. A few days later when your breathing slows to a few uneven gasps and suddenly stops, what are you seeing as you stare through me, your eyes fixed on the ceiling near the door? I need no mirror to show me your death. Every day I translate your last breath.   © Penny Harter, published on-line in Umbrella             From Recycling Starlight, in-press with Mountains & Rivers Press, 2010. ----------------------------------------------   Composed Composed was the word you found toward dawn on the day you died, the word you’d come to in the night after our doctor had confirmed that you were sick unto death— the word that stopped all medication and finally let us give you what you most desired—a cup of lemon sorbet, although you could not swallow. That morning when I asked you to tell me how you felt, you repeated it, composed, but said no more, offering no glimpse into the journey your spirit  had taken to get there. Whose body is this? It’s not my body! you’d said a week or so before, raising your head from the pillow to look down at what was left, wanting to levitate above it all, to find release. Was it that simple, Love? Or did you feel a tugging in the dark as something out there seized the other end of the cord they say confines us to the flesh and began to pull?   © Penny Harter             From Recycling Starlight, in-press with Mountains & Rivers Press, 2010. ------------------------------   Coins on the Eyes of the Dead After you die, the gentle nurse closes your eyes, then leaves us there, your daughter and me, as she pulls the curtain closed across the space that opens into living, into blinking machines and passing bodies that seem ghosts, foggy figures drifting by in a distant hum. After you die, I croon your name again and again, as if you are newborn, stroke the few wisps of your hair that chemotherapy has left us, clasp your right hand, while your daughter holds the other. There must be better words for this, words that will wheel a new machine up to your bed, attach it to your soul and call it back; words that can undo the mottled white and red that creeps up from your ankles to your calves. And now my words slip backwards as I lay two coins—red leaves from autumn trees that even then were far beyond your reach—on the pale hills of your eyelids. Today, a small rain spatters my window, and new green graces the oak beyond. Cars hum by on the wet road— barges on a river I must cross to see the nurse still thumbing your eyelids closed in that cubicle, that cave of unknowing, that place I visit, where I do not find you.   © Penny Harter             From Recycling Starlight, in-press with Mountains & Rivers Press, 2010.   ------------------------------   By the River This is the final day of years of sweetness.                                       Petrarch You have been gone a year. The taste of you has stayed with me these twelve months, your honeyed warmth lingering on my limbs. Today, I sit on a floating dock by the river, listening to the faint hum of insects as I enter a rippling that flows from a center I have yet to find. For your last meal, you wanted sweetness— lemon sorbet in a paper cup— and I watched the nurse spoon it into your waiting mouth as if you were an infant, watched you savor a sweetness that would carry you out. It is autumn again, and the trees have begun their fierce burning. Remember how we walked through scarlet and gold, stooping to pick up the best of the fallen? How I sent some to my mother just weeks before she died, sealing them in an envelope with the kiss of my saliva? Today, I give our sweetness to this river, send it out on floating yellow leaves that flicker on the water like candles for the dead.   © Penny Harter             From Recycling Starlight, in-press with Mountains & Rivers Press, 2010. -------------------------------------- The Fontanels We cup the newborn head, protecting the fontanels—those soft spots that flex as we pass from fluid to air, from fish to flesh. We palpate the fibrous membranes spanning the bony plates of the infant skull, feel the heart’s blood pulsing through blue veins. How can we have lived without breath as we gyred in the womb, our eyes blinking while practicing for light? Now we practice for whatever element that we must enter next, wondering what will yield.   © Penny Harter             From Recycling Starlight, in-press with Mountains & Rivers Press, 2010.