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The diagnosis.
The C9orf72 gene.
The telling, the children, the mother.
The hiking stick, the cane, the rolling walker.
The lift chair, the gait belt, the ramps.
The hospital bed.
The power wheelchair banging the door jambs.
The reclining shower chair, the Hoyer lift.
The oxygen concentrator, the baby monitor.
The G-tube, the kangaroo pump.
The Medicaid machine.
The hospice nurse.
The grinding, the measuring.
The changing of sheets in the night.
The pointing at letters of the alphabet.

—with a prayer from Cymbeline

Who knows why the fledglings died—
slowly—lingering even now in the nest
built in the clothespin bag hanging from
a nail on the porch while the frantic
parents sing forth their lament.

Was it the cramped contours of the bag
bristling with wooden pins, or our evening
presence on the porch, or the early laying
of six small eggs in this long cold spring
of frigid nights.

I love ordinary piety,
rosaries, hausmadonnas in their niches,
anonymous shrines alongside ditches,
Mary visions, cults, sobriety
ancient, feral, rude. Motherly,
I bless, cradle, grieve. I’m shown wearing
lilies, roses, thorns . . . angels bearing
me on clouds, on a snake—otherly
real, not upheld by scholarship, but fresh,
gut. Michelangelo and Fra
Lippo Lippi believed. Their art is raw
with it. I bleed. I’m a thing of flesh.
I wear all costumes, every deathbed wake.

The Easter cold relents by afternoon,
and spring feels nearly spring, though snow still packs
the shaded paths. I walk where lichened rocks
have shed their ice with help from the young sun,
and here’s the risk of being on my own:
I find, knotting and unknotting himself
like some old symbol meant to stand for life,
the year’s first snake, disentombed from the stone.

“and I am perpetually awaiting / a rebirth of wonder”
                           Lawrence Ferlinghetti

No Footwashing.
No solemn Eucharist.
No stripping of the altar.
No keeping watch
by the Blessed Sacrament.

in the fading blur of last night’s dream,
the tiles’ seams beneath my feet,

the saucer’s crack, the hard dirt trail,
the lavender air, the stumbling prayer,

the shower’s steam, the empty page,
the scurry of words, the fire of noon,

the wooden knock of interruptions,
the droop of afternoon, the stab

of grief imbedded in a tune,
the string of syllables in flight,

the lost connection, the evening wine,
the sinking haze of the yet-undone—

First Easter without
(he died in the summer)
and alone

although
in her driveway my neighbor
offered at arms’ length
a loaf of new bread

and I took the bread
in the same way
and at my table broke it
with gloved hands

and processed
like a Mary
to my friend
and gave her portion

saying
Take and eat
this is for you

and taking the bread
with bare hands
O gracious she said
I am hungry

and praises arose
like leaven
in our hearts.

“Blessed be sin if it teaches men shame.”
               —Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

This clod-caked taproot tugged from soil      
Then rinsed in water clear & cool

Flares like a soul made visible
By sin that’s seen as good once gone.

The world consists of there/not-there.
I choose between each one each hour.

I eat the carrot raw & whole
From tawny tip to fronded crown.

You know, I said, I’ve often thought life
is a long walk up a sleety street and it’s night.
You know what I mean? And it’s just you and
my goodness, it’s colder than anyone let on.
People pass you but they’re not people. At
the ends of leashes, dogs that are not dogs.

And here and there next to the plots of bones
we keep planting with almost no signs of spring,
steeples point their icy fingers.

O it’s possible to be so lonely so lonely
the soul of your soul can quiver with
how lonely it is possible to be