I think I disagree that there is a quantum leap between living and non-living.
—George Church, Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School
So at nineteen he gave his life to God,
& now—hands slippery as fish, skin
pocked & spotted, beard
falling, simply falling from his face—
he asks about that girl I knew, the one
who sat next to me in his honors lit,
who when we were both nineteen
& drinking at some ridiculous college party
fell three stories
& broke below,
on the sidewalk. I remember
he had us reading then the Inquisitor,
though when I came to see him
at the Jesuit House we didn’t
speak of it. (How will you live? Aloysha asks.
How will you love them? With such a hell
in your heart & in your head?)
& neither do we now. Speak, that is,
of love, this pause, my pause, falling
awkwardly between us. She’s good,
I finally tell him. She’s in a home,
has a job answering phones
at a lawyer’s office in the afternoon.
Then takes her pills, sees her movie,
is asleep religiously by seven.
Like stuck birds banging at a pane
of dirty glass, his old lips flap.
I wouldn’t want he says,
to live like that. & days later just like that
he is dead, or down far enough that river road
of lotus flowers some dichotomist named him
dead & dead & dead forever. See, it was
happening: years ago, he’d have never
said a thing like that. Or the way that day
he spoke & closed his cloudy eyes,
then woke & spoke again—about this time
something else entire. The way even now
she sometimes says my name, & in her blue eyes
birds take wing—
though a moment later her face
goes slack, then spastic. It’s happening:
for eighty years that brilliant, godwracked man
falling into the bounds of his body:
for however many years she’ll ever have
that godblown girl holding
in her trembling, not-quite fist the phone:
or this one, God, this one I hold,
my six-day’s child, already
sloughing off his birthing skin.
