Jeff McCallum

The Simple Truth

There is the poem, and there is the poem within the poem, something the kind and wonderful Mary Logue showed me.

I imagine the poem below is really in the first eleven lines, as the poetry editor at the Yale Journal commented. The sad humor, the simple truth lie there. The cathartic experience for me, and for my father, seems to be in the entirety, in the simple narrative of the story telling. Perhaps one day I will be able to do it all. In the mean time, I will take the healing effect of poetry for the wonder that it is.

Four by Four

The hospice nurses came two by two

or rather

one after the other

asking questions about love and dying

until her husband was too tired to answer

and she

after sixty years of marriage

too dumbfounded to understand the why

They forgot to leave

the little pamphlet that was to make it all so simple

so my mother told me

Dying becomes somehow more real to some

when someone official tells you someone one you love is

Not that god needs to knock on the door and remind you

or that god did really

or does

though in rare cases god has been known

to at least warn you or someone you love

to please be more careful

put down that cigarette

slow down for goodness sakes

and so on

like that

It could have been so much worse

you remember someone saying

Not that dying

in this case in particular

is actually a surprise

However

even at eighty one or eighty two

with emphysema

oxygen tanks

chronic heart problems

bad knees

the victim of an exploding air bag in an ancient Volvo

on top of the pneumonia

when The Doctor

sends the nurses calling

bells can be heard that much more clearly

fog seems to clear

and the sound of each word

of every breath

straining to be heard

is heard

is listened for

with a concern and a clarity that was perhaps

lacking

before the nurses came

two by two

or rather one after the other