The next few are a kind of series
that begin the book Shades.
"What Hell Is."
Your father sits inside his spacious kitchen
corpulent and powerless.
Nobody knows for sure how your disease is spread.
It came from love or some such place.
Your father's bought, with 40 years of fast talk
door-to-door, this fancy house you've come home now to die in.
Let me tell you what hell is, he says.
I got this double fridge all full of food,
and I can't let my son go in.
Your parents' friends stop visiting.
You are a damper on their spirits.
Every day you feel more cold.
No human being here can bear the thought.
It's growing huge as you grow thin.
You're 37.
You will not be 38.
Ain't it a bitch, you say, this getting old.
And now all day you stare at us without a word.
The doctors tell us not to touch you if you weep or bleed,
applying salve to sores that cannot heal.
Your brother wears a rubber glove.
With equal meaning, cold or kiss would kill you,
so is everybody lethal?
What did we mean by love?
No human being helps except suddenly, simply Jesus.
Him you hold.
The man who used to love his looks
is sunken bone and looking out.
Framed by immunities of telephone and lamp,
his mouth is dark.
His eyes are shut.
He's always somewhere in the house
while we discuss this fear.
Increasingly he's spoken of, not to.
In kitchen conferences we come to terms that we can bear,
but where is he?
In hell, which is the living room.
In hell, which is the easy chair.