Today
On Kawara’s “Today” series
Jan.4.2022
A call is just a call. I pick it up.
Jan.6.2022
I lift blankets looking for my father.
Jan.7.2022
When I take off the patch, your eye is gone.
I spend the day in other people’s tears.
Jan.9.2022
Someone says your eyelid almost came off,
the doctors tried to reattach it. I
close my eye all day to see if I can
feel your dying. What is dying but a
form of hunger, visible to God. When
we pull down your shirt, your good eye opens.
All the waiting, the moon is an athlete.
Jan.11.2022
The woman who let you fall won’t look at
me. In each of us, there is a stranger,
a single road that in one instant forks.
Jan.12.2022
There’s a name for it. The way your mouth stays
open, no breathing. We hold our breaths as
if companions of your dying. Cheyne-Stokes,
named after two doctors. What if we named
everything? The last hand-squeeze before death,
the way your eye looks at me when I talk,
the way the reincarnated cry the
most, bewildered by the star’s second blink.
Jan.13.2022
I tell a story about something, with
my arms waving. And your arm grabs mine, as
if I am a messiah. But really
I withheld food and drink from you so that
your feet that loved to walk would never touch
the ground again. And I wonder why we
are always on our hind legs, to see what?
Jan.15.2022
Maybe we feel dizzy because we are
moving and so is the earth. On some days,
I can tell the earth is rotating in
another direction. Today I meet
a hospice nurse named Harsh. He is sweet, sweet.
Jan.16.2022
They drop the morphine under your tongue. How
it must feel like a faint raindrop taken
from the sky. It’s been two weeks since the fall
and death still catches me by surprise.
I feel nothing. It is raining morphine.
Jan.17.2022
No matter how I scold you, you won’t die.
Meanwhile, there are no birds in the sky, they
have all flown into your brain. I always
knew that our thoughts were birds, but I didn’t
know they would return for the funeral.
Jan.18.2022
Five breaths. Then a minute of not breathing.
I time it, announce it, as if you are
running a race. You would have loved winning
this race to annihilation. Because
you are winning, your mouth is shaped like an O,
has been open for fourteen days now, as
if to say you aren’t done telling me
that Rilke’s Open doesn’t exist, that
our eyes aren’t inverted, that we can see
everything an animal sees with our
eyes closed and our mouths open. If I lean in,
I can hear all the words said in your
life, now in a different order. There’s still
no love, even though I’ve looked through all the
words twice. I go digging in the mass grave
of language for the extra loves and I
end up bringing loneliness back with me.
Jan.19.2022
Every phone call says the same thing, that he
is hanging on. And I imagine you
holding on to the edge of a building,
the city’s mouths waiting for you to jump.
Jan.20.2022
Today is your birthday. Someone came in
and said, they’re still not feeding him? thinking
I was someone else. The eyes press against
the glass of my brain. They can’t touch me but
they won’t stop looking. Eyeballs have footsteps
too. When they walk, they sound sticky. Hundreds
of them have gathered outside the window.
Jan.22.2022
The sky is crooked at my feet. I’m tired
of someone else’s dying. I’ve lost two
pounds because I’ve been chewing rain instead
of swallowing it. Because you haven’t
been eating or drinking, all the food I
eat tastes twice as dead. Twice as good. In the
room down the hall, a man has a stroke, half
of his body splits off. The caretakers
gossip. My sister won’t stop crying, keeps
telling everyone she was your favorite.
Jan.23.2022
They called me at 4:30 am and
I don’t remember what they said. But I
know they never said the word death or died.
Jan.24.2022
The funeral home calls and I open
your checkbook, a balance of mocking birds.
Jan.26.2022
On my notebook, a large group of ants. I
wonder why they had only gathered there
and on Etel Adnan’s Time. They walk on
these words: When no one is waiting for us
any longer, there’s death, so faithful. I
spend the morning killing ants and wonder
how many insects I have killed until
now. All the killing to prepare me to
forgo the feeding tube. Yesterday I
drove past a group of boys running without
their shirts. At the stoplight I could only
see the way their sweat lifted from them. And
I realized the ants weren’t coming from the
floor but were coming from my words. Down the
road, another group of runners going
in the opposite direction, having
no idea of the other runners. All
this time, I thought I didn’t know a thing.
Jan.27.2022
When death was near, I could touch time. It was
softer than I thought it would be. There were
two of them. When I tried to measure their
lengths, I was sent back to the living. I
was shorter but my shadow was longer.
Jan.31.2022
I read you ten poems, eight-hundred-fifty-
nine lines, I had fourteen coffees, nine creams,
twenty-three bobas. I cried zero times.
Feb.1.2022
Another day went by. Still no feeling.
Why is language the only thing I have?
I wonder if it’s possible to live
by persistence, wanting so badly to
remain secured to the body, that his
soul left fourteen years before its vessel.
When asked when a painting was done, Rothko
said, there’s tragedy in every brushstroke.
Feb.3.2022
A man from the funeral home called me.
His voice was so flat, I took a nap while
he talked. When I woke up, I was in the
casket looking up at the ceiling fan.
I couldn’t move my body and a patch
covered my left eye. I heard my own voice
describing my fall onto a knob, how
I lost my left eye, how I refused to
die. And then I saw myself bend over
to look at me. My own hand grabbed my hand
but I couldn’t feel it or move my eye.
I saw myself for who I was—evil,
full of syllables. Poets are useless.
Feb.4.2022
Twice now I’ve thought about the wood casket
and what proportion of the ashes are
wood. Twice now I’ve read about the chamber,
this time I learn it is called a retort,
also a sharp reply. This time, I read
about the pugilistic stance when they
burn the body, the boxer-like pose the
body makes. I think about my father,
alone in the retort, in a small box,
two thousand degrees, his legs bent, his fists
ready to punch me and my live flesh.
Feb.6.2022
The cows have spread out and I have counted
fourteen. Their heads always hang down. They don’t
seem to need to look up. In that way, they
are unlike us. Our euphoria that
comes directly from despair. Look up, we
say, to remind us that we will all die.
Here, the sky is made of nothing. It is
so vast that the twenty-five people who
live here don’t have enough sight to change it.
Feb.9.2022
Today they burned my father. A man named
Garrett called me, in his toneless voice, to
say that someone cleaned his body, covered
him in white linen. After the man called,
I felt warmer all day. My body reached
two thousand degrees but would not burn. I
realized I had not thought of my father
more than once in Wyoming. You’d never
know the planet is dying. Here, the clouds
have holes in them and the deer are more etched
with shadow. A sandwich arrives at my
door at noon. I’m so hungry that I eat
the sandwich first, then think of my father.
Feb.10.2022
Today the river is in crisis, no
horizon dares to go near it. Today
my father is in a small jar. At dusk,
I went into a painter’s studio,
saw his stretched canvas on the table, white,
empty. What are we without those who made
us? May his memory be your blessing,
people emailed me all week. The artist
was painting a series of doors, which were
so real that I walked through the one that was
slightly open. Inside the room was my
breath that I had held since January
13, an eyelid, a loose eyeball, the
knob the eye fell on, the girl’s hands that tried
to catch him, which were charred and still waving.
Feb.11.2022
The white truck went from one frame to the next
and I thought of the time when someone lied
about me. How day and night I cared so
much about the lie that it split into
two, one part went out the left window frame,
the other out the right. Like the blue car
that disappears at the same time as the
white one, yet I can see both at once. When
they burned my father’s body, I wondered
if the eyeballs spread so far on each side
that they could see Wyoming, these two panes,
me on a small brown chair, looking out the
windows, waiting for oblivion to
travel through with its eighteen wheels and truth.
Feb.12.2022
At the beginning of our family tree
was hope. Or maybe it was just an owl.
Feb.13.2022
The same wind was blowing here eighty years
ago, always snapping families in half.
Feb.14.2022
If I keep the window closed, I am stuck
inside with language as it buzzes back
and forth, trying to get out and start wars.
My sister is the only one left. If
she is the favorite of nothing, then
I must be one of Calvino’s cities,
the one with angular shadows, the one
that when turned on its side, becomes a line.
Feb.15.2022
The caskets are shaking. The white-tailed deer
gently cross the river. I hike up the
hill to find my feelings. Instead, I run
into Hope, who doesn’t look at me or
stop, but walks down the hill. Today could be
a day where everything is beautiful.
Feb.16.2022
Yesterday, I walked to the small chapel,
head down, yet all the people driving by
waved to me as if they knew what I had
just done, as if they knew I was going
to the chapel. When I got there, fourteen
white-tailed deer stopped and stared, moving away
from me, as if they also knew. Inside, the
cold mixed with the cold from my body and
the moment of mixing, the stained glass, and
my sobbing finally came. It was so
delayed that I wasn’t sure if I was
crying for the deer that wouldn’t stay, or
the nine people I had just met and would
soon leave behind, the snow that would
come after I am gone, or my father.
I left a note in the guest book, wrote his
name. Above it, Thomas and Claire Bushnell,
married the day before my father’s death,
a tribute to Traveler, one of the
best horses ever. It’s time to go home.
Feb.17.2022
Each of us comes from somewhere with blossoms.
