David Gruber

The Sick-Bed

1.  when God came to breathe into man the breath of life, he found him flat upon the ground

Scarce had the sun gone out, laid a blanket over sight, than a copia of silver pinpricks  gave darkness shape and texture. 

And knowing night from day rendered useless, we were become captives to twilight so close that its farthest elements seemed the most likely to reach up and maul us. 

Such a shallow dimension affords only adumbration –
all the world laid flat and bare
before our eyes, though we could hardly
make it out through the flickering shadows
the nausea of weightless thought:

the prisoner in her attic, a heartbeat quick between those narrow walls,
a mere two or three steps.

2.  when he comes to withdraw that breath from him again, he prepares him to it by laying him flat upon his bed

A man’s life is a thousand years long, his soul a sick duration stretching from one swallow to the next, alive with broken glass.  His bed is a womb, a grave in which his adulthood flowers

and all that which moisture usually brings
appears in blue palette: limp heads dangle
at the end of weak stalks, twitching in a wind
the scraps that were once our hearts and our sinews
flap aimless against the distant dawn. 

The patient says that there is an outline of the world emerging from the night.  Such desire lingers in the luminance of far-off lights and youthful fancies, their forgotten violent color.

His own surrendered soul looks out over alien seas
the distance between them red as an epitaph.

3.  another tells me, I may rise; and I do so…how many men are raised, and then do not fill the place they are raised to?

How like ash a man is, dwindling to a spark as the night comes round him, chalky and motionless and ever in fear of the cold gust he believes will raise him up into powder; but opening eyes on the sun, he moves

as a panther, oblivious to the heavy flesh that trails
and stands and turns in a circle giddily

new sunlight fills out his grave and roots and floral tendrils
pull him standing from the earth
no filter between
sight and true sight
the river solid with ice

and, closer, thousands of faces lean in to greet us
men and women who might suddenly touch our cheek and laugh

Chance turns to us anew and with a sharp gesture describes the elliptical orbits and sub-orbits we make about the world: the sudden memory of summer striking tall pines that shed an amber penumbra, beneath which a figure walks away from us; her arms flicker with each step. 

This memory, colored by the sleep-distorted spectrum: the sun at last touching ice, waking the water.