Monday, April 18, 2016

Death in a Hospice Room Captured by an Artist and a Poet

T MAGAZINE

An Artist and a Poet Capture Death in a Hospice Room

APRIL 14, 2016

For T’s ongoing series, the Rome prize-winning artist Nari Wardresponded to a poem by Carol Muske-Dukes, the former poet laureate of California.

“Off the hook” by Nari Ward, 2016.CreditCourtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

LIVE, DIE: A GHAZAL

The door of the hospice room in which you die
stays open. Dreaming, you drift there, dying

in that floating bed of fierce arguments that live
on, until the moment when you no longer live.

Cheered on by a chorus of voices as you die,
“Go now! Go to the light!” Still, Don’t die!

Cries a dissenting voice within: a flickering live
Wire behind the nightlight’s angel face. Live

News at 7 AM, after the great orange moon dies.
Sunlight fingers a blue bowl of shaved ice. Die?

No. Not now. A tiny version of you pops out alive
From a burning wood, swims upstream, panting. Live

as Nurse Good’s softshoe entrance to applause, dying.
She smiles, squints at her syringe, held up, lit, like dye

bubbles lengthening in a radiant corridor: see lives
unborn (half-souls blindly pushing toward life)

gather outside time, inside your mind. Move! Die!
they cry. You won’t acquiesce. Mother, I cannot die

For you, I don’t know how. You brought me here alive.
You taught me everything but how to let you die.

— CAROL MUSKE-DUKES

Carol Muske-Dukes reads “Live, Die: A Ghazal”

Friday, May 23, 2014

"Hospice" Poem by Robin Becker from Tiger Heron

May 21, 2014

Hospice

by Robin Becker

I wanted to believe in it, the word
softer than hospital but still not home—

like any other frame house on the street,
it had a lawn, a door, a bell—

inside, our friend lay, a view
of the garden from her room but no lift

to raise her from the bed. A sword,
the sun plunged across the cotton blankets.

I wanted dying to be Mediterranean,
curated, a villa, like the Greek sanatoria

where the ancients cared for their sick
on airy porticos and verandas

with stone paths that led to libraries.
A nurse entered her room and closed the door.

For the alleviation of pain, I praise
Morpheus, god of dreams, unlocking

the medicine drawer with a simple key,
narcotic placed beneath the tongue.

In the hall, the volunteer offered us coffee.
How could I think the Mozart in G major

we played to distract her could distract her?
Or marble sculpture in the atrium?