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.