Walking With Ghosts

 
He walks just past midnight,  
Meds taken,  
Breathing treatment a hassle  
But done.  
 
Take the oxygen tank or not?  
Take. Hot and humid still,  
So take. Might help.  
Probably won’t.  
Take the oximeter, monitor the heart.  
Grab the cane and out the door.  
 
Go slowly, old man.  
 
Which he does, up the gentle slope to the road,  
Past the sweet seduction of flowers  
Reminding him of tilted tombstones.  
Stops twice to calm the breathing.  
 
Where the road levels out,  
He waits again  
For the breathing to catch up,  
Then begins the trudging  
Step-by-step  
Past the mailbox  
To the pothole.  
 
There, in the weeds are the  
Ghosts of the abandoned.  
Waiting.  
 
Checks his pulse,  
Not even sure he wants to know.  
150 bpm. Not good,  
Just a row of little spikes on the screen,  
Glowing green in the night.  
Crowded together like a lifetime of regrets.  
Not good.  
 
He thinks, Turn back,  
But doesn’t.  
 
He thinks of Bigly, his brindle pit-mix,  
Who used to tear up this road  
In his joy to run unleashed.  
He would stop way the hell up ahead  
And look back, checking to see  
If the old man was still there,  
Then plunge into the soybeans or corn,  
Depending on the year.  
 
Remember?  
 
My god but I miss him.  
But he has a good home.  
Still, he’s not coming back.  
He, too, is a ghost.  
 
Walks slowly on,  
Half-expecting his heart to explode,  
And not much caring anymore.  
How many times do you  
Have to go to the ER  
Before you quit fighting  
The inevitable?  
 
Get real.  
You can barely walk.  
 
At the turnaround he rechecks the pulse.  
Still the same. Rachmaninov pounding the ivories  
Inside his chest.  
 
A slight upgrade on the way back,  
Bad enough he’s afraid to check.  
Past the pothole where he found the starving kittens  
He tried to save. Two died, two lived.  
Stops to rest.  
 
The two ghosts slowly emerge from the undergrowth  
On wobbly legs, as they always do. The kittens.  
Starving. Transparent as an afterthought.  
Dumped.  
 
I have not forgotten you.  
I can’t. Sometimes I wish I could.  
 
They gaze back at his best intentions,  
Beyond judgment or blame.  
 
Soon enough we will be together, he says.  
And watches as they move back into eternity.  
 
Nearly home now.  
Starting to relax and  
Down the uneven slope,  
With the undulations counseling caution:  
Not the time to get careless.  
His heart still doing its rat-a-tat-tat  
On the ribcage of mortality  
But slower now.  
Downhill helps.  
 
Home, at last, he plugs into the oxygenator,  
And listens as it chuffs out  
Three liters of blessed oxygen a minute.  
Breathing gradually decent.  
 
He sits there  
With his heart winding down  
And thinks of all the poetry  
He still needs, wants to write.  
Not time to go just yet.  
Soon.  
 
Starving kittens, a dog  
He can no longer take care of.  
Once here, in his lap,  
At his feet.  
Now gone. Ghosts,  
All of them.  
 
In the end he falls asleep in his chair,  
Wrapped in the comforter of exhaustion,  
A recording of rain on a tin roof  
Lulling him to sleep.  
 
And imperceptibly, he knows not how,  
The language of rain sings  
A once-upon-a-time lullaby  
And he is a child again on the farm,
Sixty-some years of time  
Washed away by the rain.  
 
He sits there in the leaky tin-roofed barn in Kansas,  
With the rain coming down rat-a-tat-tat  
And his pink lungs breathing  
The wondrous earthy smell  
Of the cows he remembers so clearly,  
Swishing their tails against the flies,  
With kittens lapping milk from a rusty coffee can,  
A brindle dog at his feet.  
 
And his heart at last lies easy.  
As if it would always be as perfect as this.  
As if none of them  
Would ever die.  
 
1 July 2022