Our Dead Pancreases
Within my father and me, they are
bellwethers of the body’s ruin.
Pancreases turned inside out–
empty pockets
on the day a bill comes due.
Or maybe
my metaphor should be shaped
with more elegance than that
for such a fragile pair as these:
pancreases nudged through life
by the ocean’s shifting hand
coiled into knotted stars
under the broad wand of night.
However you choose to imagine them, know
they are dead,
but still needy, even in their caskets,
even under the disarming sweetness of stars.
When mine died,
my father knelt beside my hospital bed
saying it was all his fault,
that somehow his broken pancreas
became my inheritance–
a thing passed between father and daughter.
Together we sift through
this winter of my pancreas.
How did we miss this?
His eyes fall on my insulin drip.
How did we miss this?
The sting of it
restoring my senses
enough for me to wonder if we aren’t the same inside–
if the collapse of a man’s heart
wouldn’t also kill his daughter.
But the summer that the rest of him died
I knelt in the grass,
let his ashes sprinkle
the ground
such hazy grains,
as if he’d never been anything
more than sugar
as if my body had been made right
by the wrong of his.
My pancreas, unknotted
needing nothing more from me
than breath.
Only my breath, running deep and wild
my breath, everywhere
untroubled by damage and loss
my breath in its own right–
a confetti of energy
seeding the earth.
