Michael Diehl, The Rock 2
Fable in Need of a Moral
Chemo razed her scalp, defending her,
but by the time the head scarfs gathered
like chromatic battle flags in her dresser drawer
cheered her, her doctor told her
the fight was over.
In a chair on the deck,
she watched the ash tree’s shade
close over her like gray water over jetsam;
a twilight mosquito arrived
with a message for a poet, not for her.
No thing living resented dying,
but she did; no dying thing but she
felt thrown away; the yellow moon strolled by
unperturbed as a peach; beyond the stars,
a slick elixir, Jesus beamed.
Tucked in a shawl, she sipped lemon tea,
trying to pretend warmth was Jesus’s love;
but her tumors snickered, and the kitchen clock
tick-tocked tick-tocked tick-tocked;
she couldn’t remake her mind in a day.
On TV a man dying ate a mushroom,
closed his eyes and felt a voice
assure him the vast and beautiful mystery
his mind was unfolding, his death belonged to, too;
he rose unburdened as though reborn.
She slumped to the floor and lingered,
propped against comfort’s locked doors,
until kneed half-aside by morphine pills
and too weak to grasp even if she could reach
a deeper truth anyway, she died.
______________
Steve Hatfield
Review by Jared Pearce
Generally the fables I know sort of soften-up at the end, but such is not the case here. Here the fable focuses only on the fact that are present, only on what is perceived and explainable, only on the end that unfolds for all of us. The fable, then, could be that there is a fable at all, or perhaps that any kind of moral could possibly fit the unfolding.