Rattle

Ain’t that a kick in the head, you remarked to those assembled
as the doctor explained the x-ray to you.
….and you see this right here, this big.....well, big dark spot

there on your pancreas.....

The options he presented,
and you frowned them away
as the immensity, the ultimate outcome,
settled in like ashfall upon the hushed room.

No, I don’t think I’ll do any of that.
I think we need to go take a trip, huh?
Yeah....that’ll be swell.

Your youngest daughter slips out to the hallway
to sob next to the cafeteria cart
and its plastic maroon lunch trays
heavy with roasted chicken, runny mashed potatoes (no salt),
pale green peas with a smattering of carrots diced into little faded orange cubes,
and teetering blocks of bright red jello, stacked as if for a child.

Oh, you were never one much for doctors or hospitals --
despite the open heart thing
and the abdominal aorta aneurysm thing
and the second open heart thing --
what with all their poking and prodding and temperature taking
when you were just falling to sleep.
Just leavemethehellalone, will ya?!?

And now this...
So we took you home.

And for weeks you were fine, as if nothing amiss.
You tended even to some backyard tomato plants --
I’m going to grow something.....just like George Bowen across the street --
and thus you held up the shiny red produce of your labors for all to see.
But mostly you sat in your recliner and tapped on the armrest,
worrying it for some solution to the unspoken dilemma.

Eventually, you took to the bed and never left it --
reliant upon you daughters to change you
and put you in fresh pajamas, grimacing all the while --
Just leavemethehellalone, will ya?!?
Like that time in the hospital when I had to point you to the toilet
but we missed and you hit the suture where they’d
removed your saphenous vein for the bypass.
-- Goddammit, Michael!!!

Your room, your house,
but in a cold metallic hospital bed you lay,
eyes straight at the ceiling
staring at God only knows what -- some dot, a speck of dust, a memory.
A withering gaze.

The hospice lady is kind and gentle.
She explains the “comfort box” with the morphine
and the schedule 2 drugs….because he’s really
in a very lot of pain right now,
but he can’t really let you know,
so you can’t really give him too much....
It’s about making him comfortable.

Occasionally you would rally --
pissed, usually...
angry that someone was trying to roll you,
to change you, to clean you,
and we could see some life flash back in your eyes --
or when I held the phone up to your ear
and you struggled to make a sound, any sound,
for your youngest granddaughter on the other end.
….Hey, big girl.....but your eyes said it all.

Eventually, though,
the breaths became too labored for even that --
heaving swoops of air, then a pause,
then a gurgling exhale.

Congestive something or other, the nice hospice lady explained
.....fluid builds....lungs fill up.....slowly drowns.....

(Mother bites her knuckle and turns away --
back to the kitchen to fiddle with the spoons
and the papers....the arrangements.)

That awful gurgling sound --
like the last bit of water
struggling to drain
from the faraway end of a hose pipe.

It is a regular, constant rattle
as your daughters fuss around you
in their vigil --
smoothing the bedsheets
and holding your hand
and telling you that you don’t
need to keep fighting.

That awful gurgling sound,
gnawing at everyone in the room.
We come in with a rattle,
and so we leave with a rattle.

And then,

in the middle of the night

the rattle stopped,

--total silence--

and everyone wept.

--Michael McIntyre

Dacula, 2011

Mother as a Little Girl

Mother as a Little Girl

You sit there
atop an old wooden bench.
A lifetime ago.

In anklet socks, puff sleeves
and a peter pan collar,
you hold a trio of rabbits
on some distant uncle’s dusty farm --
as it sidetracked, perhaps,
from your first Holy Communion.

Shy but certain
you look straight ahead,
skeptical but happy --
what with squirming props
on your lap
and wire rimmed glasses
that made you self conscious.

(Two older brothers,
you would tell us,
beat the snot out of anyone
who dared to call you four eyes)

Your skinny lips are twisted
noncommittally, as if to say
“I don’t really want to say cheese.”

I caught myself the other day
giving a mirror the same look.
And I remembered this picture

of you.

--Dacula
2011

One last poem for National Poetry Month.....one from a few years ago

Autumn Viewing

The loud tone over the PA beckoned our attention –
punctuating the air, signaling an announcement:
A drill? A test? A reminder of a thing forgotten?
Must we go outside and pretend the school’s on fire?
The voice from above announced your passing,
and my heart groaned while the words
echoed through the silent, empty hallways.
The students shifted nervously in their seats –
and refrained from chewing their gum.

Later, I sat in the cafeteria
as a class filed outside to sketch an autumn day.
It was nice to see the woods ablaze –
crimsons and umbers and deep rusts
sprinkled together in a symphony of crayola chaos.
What a model to sit for these students,
who know nothing of a proper canvas –
only their iPod screens and Gameboys.
Even through the mess hall aroma of meatloaf and green beans
I could smell those leaves – the musty scent of dried apricot
with plum and a hint of overripe persimmon,
like those I used to throw as a boy
at my friends who lived across the street.

At the funeral home with the widow
a crystal chandelier hangs oblivious from its ornamental medallion
like my hands at my sides, not knowing where to go.
The adults shift nervously on their feet
and refrain to look but straight ahead.
In the corner under a crucifix
they have placed you, Bob Murphy.
You rest amid the flowers –
giant masses of asters, chrysanthemums, gerberas –
and there is a red velvet kneeler for the prayerful.

The box where you lie is simple –
solid, rich brown oak with a tight grain,
straight lines and no adornments.
Off to the side they’ve placed the pictures of you:
as a little boy grinning shyly,
in a football uniform, ruddy-faced at summer camp,
with your brothers, smiling on vacation, holding a new baby,
balancing two red-headed children on your knees,
and then in artful black and white
you stare into the eyes of your beloved the day you wed.

This parlor is so pretty,
with its gilded mirrors and brass sconces;
the shining highboy once held table linens, perhaps,
and an immaculate sideboard stands
with no food upon it.
All I can smell are the lilies,
the damask upholstered couches,
a wisp of lemon oil,
and the woman in blue with too much perfume.

Your widow leaves the room to take some air,
and the room sighs, relieved at her exit.
Your brothers, with their freckles
and sharp Irish chins, work the room
shaking hands and saying hello and thank you
to people they do not know.
The eldest is rumpled—
the first shirt he found and threw in a duffel
as he raced to catch a red-eye.
Kind, polite, and nodding,
they look and sound too much like you
and it hurts to speak with them.

In a well-lit curio cabinet rests a collection of bells –
little dainty brass tinklers,
a miniature china bell with a winter scene,
some crystal fluted bells with etched lines,
one blue jasperware with a cameo,
a dented copper cow bell,
small brass school bells with wooden handles,
a porcelain tea bell,
and a reproduction Liberty Bell.
To call from a sickbed? To meditate? To warn? To alert?

I pause behind a winged-back chair
as your students huddle around you,
looking and wondering and whispering.
I watch them watching you, inspecting you.
And they just stare:
a sad curiosity, a curious sadness.
The slight girl sobs, and a boy snickers witlessly.

And me, I slide out the side door
under cover of their confusion.
The night air is chilly and dry;
a quick breeze clips my cheeks as I turn the corner
and head for my car in the parking lot.
The whirr of a streetlamp illuminates a swirl of leaves
trapped between a pickup and a minivan.

-- Dacula, 2006

A poem because it's National Poetry Month...

This poem I wrote a few years ago, but I still like it.............

The Man Who Had a Thing for Neko Case

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Neko Case,
all because I walked past a half shuttered farmhouse
with its scraggly forsythia and bottle-thrown windows.
I heard your seraphic high notes in the distance,
stuck in a canyon at dusk with nothing but sagebrush and tears
to scare away the coyotes.
I saw you shirtless and brazen at the microphone,
smoldering looks to the ushers and the college boy in row 12,
asking about their nightmares and if they love their mothers.
Your hair lights up the darkness –
a pile of glowing embers from some burned down cottage.

In the concert hall, Garth meditates on his Lowrey,
channeling Bessie Griffin like a teleprompter.
And you, Richard Manuel, what brings you here
to the sound stage? Was it you who passed along your muse
to her fifteen-year-old runaway soul?
Where will you take me, Neko, after the show?
Will we walk to the airport and watch the planes take off?
Will we touch each telephone pole, one after the other?
Or, will we run all the way back to Tacoma,
looking for battered front porches and empty swing sets
with rusted chains?

--Michael McIntyre
Dacula, 2008

On March...

The month of March a sorrow brings. Yes, around this time every year, the daffodils have outstretched their lanky green stalks, some adorned already with the bright yellow claxons of spring soon upon us. Gangly forsythia – yellow bells, your grandmother might say – shower front yards and roadsides with their tiny golden trumpets of the new season. Even so, as the middle of this month approaches every year, it is always with a tinge of melancholy or even downright sadness. St. Patrick’s Day, you see, was my mother’s favorite holiday.

Growing up in my house there were 4 holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and St. Patrick’s Day. Oh, Halloween was tolerated – but really only as a marker for All Soul’s Day, and that meant an extra mass that we had to go to. St. Patrick’s Day, though, was eagerly anticipated every year—a major event: Boston Butt on the stove, potatoes, party at the Knights of Columbus, the whole shebang. By the 5th of the month, the shamrock-laden decorations would be out (some never went away, really, like the shillelagh that hung by the hallway door), and by the 10th of the month we children would begin to hear our mother addressing the books on the shelves in our family den – Keep away now, you! I’m not going to put up with any of your mischief this year! She was not going insane, though. She was merely anticipating Timothy.

Timothy, as you’ve likely guessed, is a leprechaun. Not just any leprechaun, mind you – but our leprechaun. He never visited anyone else. But, oh the mess he made of our house for most of that week. Books to the floor. Chairs tipped over. Toilet paper unrolled. Light bulbs unscrewed. All manner of tomfoolery we came to expect from him. And my mother took glee in every minute of it, screaming up into the kitchen cupboards as she prepared supper, with me on the stool by the counter eagerly anticipating whatever madness might ensue. Naturally, I would always just miss being able to see him, despite my mother pointing wildly to where she could clearly see him – but not quite quickly enough, for by then he had dashed off as I glanced his way. Oooooooo, Timothy!! You’ve ruined my soup!!!! And then she would look at me, mischief in her own eyes. It’s ok. I can fix it. I’ve got a few tricks that even a leprechaun doesn’t know.

And thus it would go, year after madcap year – a grown woman in a light blue housecoat chasing a leprechaun with a wooden spoon – all to the sheer delight of her children, and then to the delight of her children’s children. All until the chase eventually ended and we lay her to rest, a rest with no mischief but a blessing upon her casket, and in with the lilies some Bells of Ireland next to the freshly turned earth.

So with March every year, for me there comes a sadness. The gloom does not, however, persist. It never fails that come the 14th or the 15th or so, I begin to hear the scampering of little feet amidst the cupboards and bookshelves of my own house. And with the giggling of a little man – a giggling, yes, that I alone can here – comes the one true balm for that sad memory. Ah, yes – it is March. It is March, and there is still some mischief to be wary of, there are chairs to be righted, and books to be reshelved. Ol’ Timothy knows no rest, you see. And where there are children on St. Patrick’s Day, there are shenanigans to be had!

Work In Progress.....I think

The following is a poem that began when I was a junior in college taking creative writing with Tom O'Grady at Hampden-Sydney. From time to time I have taken it out an tinkered with it. I think it's getting there....but really not sure. Such is poetry, I guess. Let me know what you think.

Sprouse's Farm, After the Rain

Rusty tendrils of honeysuckle
weave their way up the pickets
of the front yard fence fashioned last May.
Sparkling refugees from a late summer shower
hang patiently off of bedraggled yellow petals
as if anticipating their release when I shut
the gate behind me to take my nightly stroll.

Thunder smudges pass on in the distance,
and a calm blue sky intercedes overhead
soft and agreeable in the twilight.
A solitary robin and a few vesper sparrows
stroll the wet firm grass, intently
searching out their evening meal.
Frantic squirrel dashes from tree to tree, and
an orange-tinted cloud ambles distractedly
overhead, as if tethered to the chimney
of the tidy brick bungalow next door.

A gaggle of children go back to their swing sets
for one last game of hide-and-seek,
as I whistle my way down Lucerne Drive --
Tripped over a dog in a choke-chain collar
People were shouting and pushing and saying...
Steam lifts lazily from half-cooled streets,
disrobing that familiar workaday exhaustion.
I wave hello to the old couple on the porch swing
and they nod in return--
lift up their countenance to me.

At the end of the subdivision,
where the permits and concrete curb ran out,
Sprouse’s farm --
the man who wouldn’t sell --
stretches back to the pine forest
beyond the praying mantis limbs
of the high voltage towers
that curve away in the distance.

Windows smashed out and paint peeling,
the old house sits there, remembering --
the wild eyes that turned a shotgun
on the upturned hands, the gingham apron,
then tossed a lantern into the hayloft
before one last trigger pull to the head.

Barbed wire on a half-rotted fence post
and a string of Confederate Jasmine
breaking free-- rambunctious,
tangled messily, but perfect
for the empty pebbled milk glass vase
on the kitchen window sill.

About face -- cracked black asphalt stretches on
as the sun begins its disappearance.
Vagabond children run for home
at their parents’ call;
crickets chirp in response
as the first evening stars begin their watch.

I walk on, no longer whistling,
attempting to outpace
nighttime's descending drop cloth.

small victory......I'll take it

"Oh, yay.....this is fun! It's like solving a riddle!!"

-- seventh-grade student, surprised, upon uncovering a metaphor in Frost's The Pasture