Four Days

I once stayed four days in a room that had a bed,
but wasn’t a bedroom.

Flowers grew and withered there,
but it was no garden.

Down the hall my newborn lay caught in a web;
a clustered mass of beeping tubes and wires and needles.

He had lungs but . . .
They didn’t seem interested.

While I waited, I remembered a man who died of asphyxiation while I watched.
He was a strong man, but when his lungs lost interest he cried and struggled and used his last breath to call for help then died with his eyes closed tight

which was just as well.

In the room where we waited for our son to live or die,
the television said very solemnly that the grown son of a Dead President had flown himself and a pretty young thing into the ocean, and I wondered if he cried while the water filled his lungs or if he called for help with his last breath.

But then I said to hell with him and his dead president father.
He’s had half a life, bought perhaps with a bullet to the head.
I would pay such a price for my son.
For half a life.
For any life past four days.

I would give up my God for a pill, or a powder, or a spell
that could wake up these sleeping lungs.

But no deal was offered.

My prayers and my wishes and my conjuring floated up like smoke and disappeared,
and in that four days I learned that the only God of this world is ravenous Death
who takes and takes and takes
but is never satisfied.

The room where we waited was his altar. The bed and the flowers just pretty curtains covering a window too dark to see out. I spent four days exposed to that window, and I learned that death isn’t patiently waiting for us all . . .

He’s taking us as fast as he can.