Rodney Torreson
Leaning on His Gold Crutch
in the rush-hour snow
of numb December
downtown
near the red light I'm stopped at,
a gray-haired man
in a smart gray overcoat
looking about as if
waiting for someone
and blowing on his fist
while snow whirls about his ankles,
who suddenly lifts the crutch
like a trombone
in his left hand,
and with his right acting as a slide,
thrusts it toward the overcast sky,
while his mouth
makes its mock trombone sound,
and he bends to each side,
sweetly gliding the slide
back and forth,
then stopping it cold,
punches it out five
or six times,
before his lips finally pull back
from his imaginary
mouthpiece,
and he grins wide and laughs
as if he'd knocked off a cloud.
At St. Luke's Nursing Home
Mother sweeps past the deliberate buoyancy
of front desk smiles to reach Father's room.
On a clipboard on his door,
grim swings backward chart his sure decline.
She, who makes a sanctuary of his needs,
will make him lean on her
to move the mountain of one foot
before the other toward the car,
parked for now in the circle drive,
the only turnaround here,
who'll later wheel him about the store.
Hanger in hand, she turns
to hear her off-key mate,
who can hardly speak, croon in perfect pitch,
as if heaven has his voice already
at the edge of the bed,
as nurses wisp by not wearing
the caps of old, white sails hinting at another shore.
Yet beyond the end of the string
he forgets to pull for the aid
to come running is Mother, his world
on a string, who today joins him singing,
"You're nobody till somebody loves you/
you're nobody till somebody cares,"
Mother doing what the TV trying
to pull him into range fails to do,
its remote control puzzled by
the blank face of his thumb, a face fumbling
like the one between his shoulders,
which, over these last years,
has widened to an owl's, drawing in
signals from a distancing world.
It's All Come Down to This Small Room
and a lone white sail in a fog—
a lone sail not here
when I arrived—
that has somehow painted
itself into a corner,
not far from
this table and two chairs,
one for the woman
who handed me a form
and left, knowing I must
do this alone—against
a loved one I am entirely for,
the white sail
with no boat beneath it,
now a mere flag of surrender
to sharp things
we've hidden in the house.
But since I may fail
to see it through, I lunge with pen
toward the paperwork,
which has, itself,
sailed into the past,
when false hope served
as happiness
in this dear old crazy world
which allowed a young salesman,
not knowing
what we were going through,
to call our house
an hour ago
as I grabbed my keys to leave—
and ask if he might
come over to show us
a glittering set of knives.
