Sing
by Susan Glickman
When she expressed not only shock that her father was dying
but resentment that such a thing could be happening to her, her naiveté
provoked me, outweighing the compassion I like to think I feel,
so I stated primly that my first memory was of my grandmother’s funeral
and, it having being followed by too many others to count,
my most reliable expectation was loss.
“What is it about you,” she shot back, “that attracts so much death?”
Dumbfounded, I had no answer. So I closed my eyes
and—summoning my super-power of imaginative retribution—
pictured her in a skimpy flowered bikini, bobbing along on an air mattress,
feeling invulnerable because she remembered to put on sunscreen,
oblivious that the same current leads us all, irresistibly, into the rapids.
I only joke because I’m sad. A heritage of days
responding politely to telephone solicitations, marking papers,
scrubbing mildew from between bathroom tiles with an old toothbrush,
toting up the bills, hoping the balance will be lower this month than last,
scanning the newspaper, stomach churning at atrocities committed here
or in places the names of which I can’t find on the map …
And after people die, what are we left with?
Things left unsaid. The wish to have lived with intensity
every blessed day, to have told loved ones how much we cared
before they were stretched flat under starched sheets
mouths opening for a last sweet spoonful, rheumy eyes blinking
at the squeak of linoleum under the nurses’ rubber soles
as they come in to plump up the pillows, asking brightly
“And how are we doing today?”
Not too well, actually. We’re none of us doing all that well
but words fail us, yet again. So maybe words
are not the answer. Maybe when people are dying what we ought to do
is just sing to them: not vent idle chatter, pretending nothing’s wrong,
or grasp for closure with portentous conversation,
but lift our voices in praise of what they were
each bar of music a step articulating their comings and goings
the way a staircase goes both up and down
at exactly the same time.
Susan Glickman works as a freelance editor, primarily of academic books, and teaches Creative Writing at Ryerson University and the University of Toronto. She is the author of six collections of poetry from Signal Editions of Véhicule Press, most recently The Smooth Yarrow (2012), two novels The Violin Lover (2006) and The Tale-Teller (2012), the Lunch Bunch trilogy of children’s books, and The Picturesque & the Sublime: A Poetics of the Canadian Landscape (1998).