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I touch my palms to the floor
and granite rhinos surge up my arms
and lock in my shoulders.
Water flecks on my back
and my head is shaved
by bladed cream.
But then my time in my body is up
and it’s time for my mind:
It seeks wisdom
and the rhinos fall into a well,
their faces falling apart—
I want to know what their last words are
but their lips are fading into the purple.
I put my hands into the ground again
but rhinos come only for the body
and never for the mind.
I used to want infinite time with my thoughts.
Now I’d prefer to give all my time
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| The acclaimed poet died this week. Max was twenty-five years old. He succumbed to a life-long battle with cancer. Here is another of his poems: Earthquake Country Before Final ChemotherapyFor the first time tonight, as I put my wife to bed I didn’t have to shove her off me. She turned away in her sleep. I wondered what was wrong with my chest. I felt it, and the collar bone spiked up, and where she’d rest her cheek were ribs. Who wants to cuddle a skeleton? My skeleton wandered from the house and out onto the street. He came, after much wandering, to the edge of a bay where a long bridge headed out— the kind that hangs itself with steel and sways as if the wind could take away its weight. There were mountains in the distance— triangles of cardboard— or perhaps the mist was tricking his eyes. The instant the mist made him doubtful, it turned to rain. The rain covered everything. The holes in his face were so heavy he wondered if the water was thickening— if he was leaching into them. He panicked. Perhaps he was gunked up with that disgusting paste, flesh, all over again. If I were alive I’d have told him I was nothing like what he was feeling— that the rain felt more like the shell of a crab than the way I’d held him. That it felt more like him. But I wasn’t alive— I was the ghost in the bridge willing the cars to join me, telling them that death was not wind, was not weight, was not mist, and certainly not the mountains— that it was the breaking apart, the replacement of who, when, how, and where with what. When my skeleton looked down he was corrupted in the femur by fracture, something swelling within. Out of him leaked pink moss. Water took it away. |
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