514: Some Things are Unforgettable
514: Some Things are Unforgettable
Transcript
I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.
It seems to me that the things that shouldn’t surprise me about life, are always surprising me. For example, I am always surprised that we are mortal beings. I can’t comprehend that we, ourselves, will die or that others around us die. When I was with my stepmother as she took her last breath at her home in Washington state, I remember coming back to Brooklyn and feeling as if I could not talk about it or I could not talk about it enough. I wanted to shake people and say, “Do you know? Do you know what happens to the body?”
Of course, we are always living at a time when people are dying. But when it is someone you love, a parent, a friend, everything seems to shift. I remember colors changing. The line between my dream life and my waking life was blurred. The scrim was thin between this world and the next.
Ever since her death, I have believed that to sit next to someone in their final hours is an honor. But that honor comes with consequences. It will be burned into your heart, your mind, in all its inconstant and scattered images and you will have to carry it.
Today’s poem by Alixen Pham does that work of carrying those final hours. And beyond that, it leaves room for that disconnected breathing, that inhale and exhale that’s so important for both the living and the dying. Here is an exceptional poem that honors the witnessing of a final moment.
Some Things Are Unforgettable
by Alixen Pham
Twilight
I rise like a wave
Rain
The road a snake loosening skin
Rain
A tomb for cars
Two metal doors open
My eyes search silver mirrors
The Horseman gallops through my heart
Fingers without fingers harp my lungs
My two legs trudge A green mile without flowers
The bed
Consumes the room Consumes my father
Like a half-eaten merman
Bound to a cross treading wafer-flavor wine
Years of living
winter
winter
winter
Grey black white winter’s heralds
Shivers
Thousands of tiny spears rain the windows
Organs abandon
tomorrow
A rainstorm
The monsoon
A river falls over
edges
of my eyes Color of salt
The taste of bitter melon
A ventilator breathes
metallic rasps Prayers
in the cathedral
of my skull
A white lab coat calls my father’s brain
Her fishing expedition empty
His attic remains cold
IV lines choke me cold
The weight of ten suitcases on my shoulders
Vertigo
An elliptic moon spins future
Oracle eyes see
my father
at the pier waiting for me mouth like waves
Black soil The perfume of earthworms
A concrete mausoleum Mouths mouthing
pleading crying
Silence
The Mekong River tears into the Pacific Ocean
The Puget Sound The Columbia River My father’s body
is ocean
Loneliness Freedom
The songs of humpback whales Salmons
returning home Night fog The cries
of an albatross Where is its mate
A heart monitor moans The ventilator gasps
like an eel on land Blue and purple
trees forest on my father’s hands and arms
The smell of moldy grief
of ozone of disinfectant
O sweet morphine!
The clock is jello
Black hands drag time like an anchor
I am
glue Skin
like glass breaking
Canyon eyes
A black hole my chest
My teeth inhale sharply
My father’s last
exhale
A mist of white fireflies
"Some Things Are Unforgettable" by Alixen Pham. Used by permission of the poet.
