Poem by Donna Becker

Dying in California
for Liz

I knock, peer through the bent Venetian blinds,
hear your melodic call
and step in to visit, settling on the low yellow chair.
You wear your cotton flowered nightgown
naked underneath.
You get up to go to the john;
you are so thin now and weak.
We can’t go out for a martini because the doctors won’t let you.
When we have a martini again it will be
because it is too late to matter.
You take out your teeth
as if to tell me
death is amongst us,
we need not pretend.
The new doctor said it might not be cancer.
We know it is,
but his kindness that offers
another week of denial
is kindness beyond value.
You say how lucky to be an existentialist
to have thought about death before -
if only for 5 minutes.

You talk of the love lives of your sons.
Their crying time is over, you say.
We don’t say their crying time to come will be different.

It’s a comfort you say to be with someone
who knows why I love New York.
Rocking along on the subway to the Metropolitan
Museum, theater in the park, the MOMA, the Frick.
I visited you in Red Hook
upstairs from the Chinese restaurant
garlic and fried rice the aroma on your asphalt roof patio,
sirens the soundtrack.

You tell me how great to be in charge
of how you will be remembered-
You will bequeath a lunch to your New York friends
at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station.

We laugh and talk,
trudge the sparkling,
dirty sidewalks in our minds.
I tell you that the last time I was in DUMBO,
I saw the apartment window
you pointed out years before
where you lived in the early 60’s
with the man you loved in those days.
I pictured you laughing, smoking a cigarette
walking naked past the window
now curtained.

You tire, and I go.
Sadness trails me down the dusty path -
it catches and inhabits me.
The dark centered orange flowered clockvine,
is gaudy outside your door.

Donna Becker
October 2018