The Blue Period

           For my uncle, Maurice

 

I decorate your room with Japanese art—

lotus blossoms and cherry trees; over you,

 

one IV drips chemo into small veins; other lines

crisscross, and you are a Picasso, distended

 

and overstated; I wait each day for results.

The nurses know to tip toe around news,

 

use healthy words like remission, but I hear

the pity, dripping into those lines, each one

 

killing and saving you. I can do nothing

but hang pictures and get well cards, collage

 

your room in color. In one photograph, you

paint a sky on canvas, and I am two years old,

 

at your feet, waiting. Now, I walk the halls

in Oncology, listen outside each door—vapid

 

breath and beeping monitors, the steady chatter of death.

In my dreams, I write your eulogy, watch the congregation

 

at your wake: and there you are, the man in the photograph,

painting a sky the same shade of blue each time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

copyright 2008 A. Terzian 

Not a Love Poem #27: Fallout

 

I wait for nuclear end,

bottom line marked in red,

the color of sky after

mushroom cloud stain.

 

I listen for hiss of language,

damage and fallout,

decision to destroy

as easy as I do

 

and then quiet; all is never

the same—instead, there

is chemical pressure,

uranium and hydrogen

 

like you and I and this

dirty bomb we call love.