After Leaving McGuire Veterans Hospital for the Last Time
       

This is the last place you’ll ever think
you know. You would be wrong of course.
There is time enough to find
other rooms to be reminded of,
other windows to look out,
chipped sills to lean against
that rub your elbows raw. January
is not so cold here as it is elsewhere,
a little gift. When the wind blows it is
its music you remember, not its chill
as it shakes the empty branches and arrives
wherever wind arrives. Go there then, there.
Follow the long and slender blacktop as
it struggles east along the banks
through sprawling fog not destined
to survive its movement in the morning
toward the sea. And toward the sea
the sound of singing ceases, silences
beginning with a sputter and a cough
as the driver of the truck you hitchhiked in
pulls off, and one more cloud of dust
in your life of clouds of dust disintegrates
as evening settles in. What song is this?
you remember the immigrant clinician asked,
and now again along a shoreline in the night
you realize your life is just a catalogue
of methods, every word of it an effort
to stay sane. Count to ten whenever
you begin to shake. If pain of any kind
is felt, take whatever is around
into your hands and squeeze, push
your feet as far as they will go
into the earth. Burial is likely what
you’re after anyway. If it’s unseemly,
these thoughts, or the fact that the last
unstained shirt you wore was on
a Tuesday, a week ago or more, do not
apologize. If you’ve earned anything
it is the right to be unseemly
while you decide at what point
the bay becomes the ocean, what
is the calculus of change required
to find what’s lost if what is lost
is you. Is that a song you hear
out there, where the reeds begin
to end on every curvature of coast,
is its refrain asking what you will remember,
or is it saying, no, don’t tell, ever?
You’ll realize you’re clinging
to a tree islanded amidst a brackish sea
of bulrush, the call of whippoorwills
and all the emptiness you asked for.
No reply: the nautilus repeats
its pattern, a line of waves
beats on forever as you enter them.
Somewhere a woman washes clothes
along the rocks. It was true
what you said. You came home
with nothing, and you still
have most of it left.

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Copyright © 2012 Kevin Powers All rights reserved
from Hayden's Ferry Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission