AGONAL by Bunny Goodjohn

AGONAL

After Matthew Dickman’s ‘Love’

Try as we might, we cannot help but die
in full view of the living: kissing brides,
choosing apples in the supermarket,
burying our fingers in the clothes
and folds of strangers. We die
when we are most alive: running
a marathon, braving Karaoke, choking
on a half-chewed piece of bread.
Twenty-somethings study
our wrecked hands over the edge
of their cell phones: they recommit
to skin care, renew their gym membership.
They too are dying. We die
in doctors’ waiting rooms watching
house renovation shows and navigating
online check-ins designed for the young
and good eyesight. We would sacrifice
to a god that skips the scales and tells us
how much time we have left. We go
to funerals like we used to go
to birthday parties and star in the dead’s
slideshow. We take more photographs.
At eight, I was struck mute at the slaughter
of Bambi’s mother, at how quickly she went
from here to not here with no regard
for what she left behind. A broken heap
of absence. How quickly our mothers leave us.
I’ve no time for churches with all their dead
saints and crypts. Even so, I’d like to light
a Roman candle for myself, ignite
until the matches run out. Each morning
I sit cross-legged on a cushion and imagine
my own death. I am quiet, intact, content.
Until I imagine myself kicked to death
by dwarves. My mother loved no one
but my father. Would not dance with the nurse
out of respect for a dead man. She imagined
him watching her from a celestial workbench
forever fixing the last thing she broke.
When Bolan died, the girls wore black
armbands, punctuated assembly that morning
with showy sobs. The boys were embarrassed
as boys often are. Death jumps categories:
my iPad dies every day, exhausted
by my need to know; on the counter,
lemons continue, incrementally, to die.
The boy who wrecked me died
when I was twelve. My mother bought me
a black dress, all velvet crush. I cried
with the best of them. I have paid good money
for death: the vets’ syringes, the patches of fur
shorn from the back legs. All slipped away smooth
save the three-legged cat who fought death
as if death were the neighbor’s German Shepherd
come to call him out through the fence. Yesterday,
I found a bee motionless on the deck rail.
I fed her sugar water and blew gently
across her wings. She drank and flew again
until the dog snapped her from the air.

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Bunny Goodjohn is published in both poetry and prose. Her poetry has appeared in a number of literary journals including Connecticut Review, Zone 3, The Texas Review, Kestrel, and The Cortland Review. Her poetry collection Bone Song (Briery Creek Press, VA) was published in 2015. She has published two novels: The Beginning Things (Underground Voices, CA) and Sticklebacks and Snow Globes (Permanent Press). www.bunnygoodjohn.com