Agitated, rolling in her barred bed,
the kind of prison-crib they have in hospitals,
one hand on the bar rattling, I’m not dead,
one leg thrashing, unpinioned from the walls
of bedsheets, the other amputated,
cataracts over both eyes: now those cataracts,
could they have been removed? Could she
at least have seen her tentative, belated
young visitor? My mother said it wouldn’t be
safe to have her operated on. The acts
children perpetrate on parents: here she kept
grandmother in the dark the way, I suppose,
grandmother kept her. I was young and had just left
my husband to live my life alone in a pose
of independence. Yet I felt crushed by the few
years I had lived and there she lay, writhing
out from under the rock of death as I felt crushed
by it—and responsible: what could I do
for her? I held her hand and felt the gene string
that held us, then helped my mother rush to
the nurse’s station and back again,
agitated, trying to tie Gram’s bib
as she rolled, thrashing in our prison crib
of choice denied: the possible untried.
The Dark
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