BREATHINGS

"What really matters is the next breath --
that someone will notice if you stop."
-- Rudd Fleming


I. Providence Hospital July 15, 1964

I hold you child,
breathing air as if it
were a normal thing to do,
who never knew til half a day ago
that the thin world existed.
We've turned you out,
a natural swimmer,
into stuff that will not take a stroke,
and then, at four,
we'll teach you how to swim
pretending it's a new thing to be learned.
"If you just relax, you'll float."
But the question now is air, not water:
"Keep your head up
or you'll drown."


II.

Who are the people who know things:
which side their bread is buttered on;
which way is up;
never trust a Greek with gifts?

I question air for some known necessity,
but air refuses answers,
oxygen is no teacher.
My blood, warmer than air
counsels, no questions;
accepts circumference
knows only that it is.
We share a silence.

Yet there is a dumb wanting,
aching up from ground
infecting bones.
I want:
the wind rising
kind wood
light moving
and the next breath,
for all I know is where I breathe from.


III. Veterans' Hospital Halloween, 1964

Having kept you electronically alive
past the witching hour,
the master doctor decided
that the machines had issued no imperative for breath
and in some druidic rite,
flipped a toggle
which switched you out of light.

By coffin light
only the top of your freckled head
resembled anyone we knew
and that must have been an oversight;
some new cosmetician maybe
who didn't know how to disguise
the top of a bald man's head.
The sight revoked tears if not pain
and we left you breathless to the ground.

The year you stopped competing for air
I gave you up, father,
not unwillingly
exchanged for a son,
a runner for another generation.


Julia Douglass
p. 224
New Orleans Review
vol. 2, no. 3
©1971