In the hospice where you died, a lot of money
was spent to make the place conform to someone’s
algorithm of home—shag carpeted lobby,
wood paneled elevator, particle board furniture
with shrink wrap thin mahogany veneer, faux marble
linoleum tiles. There were paintings of chickens
in a barnyard on the walls of every room.
The homier they tried to make it, the more clinical it felt.
You of course were out of it by then, the ersatz homeyness
was for the living, not the almost dead.
And in the rare occasions when you woke
and tried to talk, I could only hear enough
of what you murmured to know how far away
you were from anything I knew, alone
in a remoteness that today seems almost
familiar, though no less remote, like hospice
you might say, by another name: my face
isolated, in a square stacked with the squares
of friends and family inside the screen sized square
our separate boxes make together, boxes
talking box to box as in a bar, or restaurant
face to face, as in a pre-posthumous world
of host and game show faces mummified
to paste, to pasty smiles of dead celebrities
still quipping, “How many balls on a pool table?”
“Depends on how many men are playing pool!”
I think I hear you in our edgy laughter,
as if we’d won a one-way ticket to
a last resort, a Club Meds of an island
rendezvous, a hidden, herded hoard
of “I” germs doing anything to keep
alive and still be seen and heard. Funny
how signing off, no matter who I wave to,
it’s you I always see wave back at me,
the two of us together once again
in a lost dimension, as if we’re both on ship
and shore, stranded departing, waving till
the square goes mute and blackens and the room
with just myself inside it feels so unreal
I’m virtually nowhere, where you are.
—Alan Shapiro
Alan Shapiro’s new book of poems, Proceed to Check Out, will be published in 2022.
