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ALS: How it was

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.

The wren’s lament

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.

Madonna on her countless portraits

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.

Serpent

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.