Right Before Dying

Toes swollen, face disfigured,
belly beyond rational comprehension--
she waddles like a penguin among the masses
making a point
with her being,
a signifier of becoming
(and dying)
below the breast-bone,
a signifier that inspires dread and awe,
memories of rearing, smothering, and rupture,
embeddedness and powerlessness;
a bulge, a knitting-of-molecules
beyond her, inside her, among us,
a microcosm occupation
a grand installation
a torturous and titillating expansiveness
that cannot and will not stop
no matter her refusal or consent.

And if she should, in fact,
refuse, the scent of resignation would pursue
her all the days of her life, somehow
cooking up a formula for interminable future-tripping
based in/on the past. So in this way, no, she cannot
refuse or resign because things growing
tend to keep growing even when roots are ripped up
and tossed out for some inconvenient projection they
explicitly or implicitly impose on
maps, time-lines, hopes, schemas, garden goals.

Rhizome at the limits of corporeality.
Flesh subtly suggesting at the precipice of reason alone.
Splay of the Spirit.

She looks so miserable,
like she’d sell her soul to let air out of the balloon,
her size defying the fly-by mechanisms most women
have cultivated by that age.
I want to praise her endurance, tell her she is doing the right thing,
as if I know that to be true,
as if such an utterance could possibly provide comfort,
knowing damn well whose that is, and who she is,
make all the difference.
Knowing nothing,
I want to tell her she is making a choice--either way.

But the seismic betrayals, somehow relatable
in this transition--
the cell getting smaller,
the desire and willingness to live getting bigger,
the upcoming prison-break, the disloyalties allowing clean
though catastrophic fractures, the choices and consequences,
the truth of those consequences, the unforgivable things,
the immeasurable mountains of meaning moving just
to prove things like inevitability and determinism right--
help me cultivate a silence only
applicable, suitable, and reverent-enough
in the face of a face like hers.