by Brian Volck
How cold the night I saw you dead. Summoned
by the night-nurses’ call, I kissed your brow,
then sat at Dad’s bedside until he woke.
He startled on seeing me. I nodded,
then spoke, and he—slowly understanding—
wrung his hands and wept, as at last did I.
Later, my brother, regarding your corpse,
reassured himself, That’s not Mom—only
her shell now, though my body knew better.
The flesh that once fleshed me with its substance,
though now rigid and pale, cold to the touch,
was unmistakably you—none other—
worthy of filial honor, still seat
of your soul, finally freed from your
long Parkinsonian captivity.
Walking to my car at that long night’s end,
I heard a hidden mockingbird herald
the bleak first light of a winter Sunday,
heard another sing in rapture atop
a rooftop cross as I entered the church,
and recalled your childlike joy in birdsong:
a house wren’s brash chatter, the great horned owl’s
unanswered query, though none so much as
the playful litanies of mockingbirds.
If bodies are more than spirit vessels,
what then was the bird: Messenger? Message?
Mere coincidence? That’s more than I know.
Yet in that queer conjunction of death, dawn,
and bird, I learned how love survives the grave,
for which the surest proof is grief—a grief
that need not leave the living desolate
when even the bitterest morning holds
some beauty in which the dead delighted.
Brian Volck is a pediatrician who lives in Baltimore. He is the author of a poetry collection, Flesh Becomes Word (Dos Madres Press) and a memoir, Attending Others: A Doctor’s Education in Bodies and Words (Cascade Books). He teaches theology and medicine at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore and is a Benedictine oblate at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert near Abiquiu, New Mexico.
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