Hold

Please listen closely
because their menu options
have changed and your call
is important to them, even if
they are experiencing
an unusually high call volume.

If you are having a
medical emergency, hang up
and dial 911.

But if your need is less
acute, more ordinary —
say, a human being who
might listen,
who might help —

then hold, and hold,
because your call
is important to them,
and they will play music —
the same, over and over —
to spare you the acuity
of a silence

that suggests a better
menu option, one
that never changes, that
does not dissemble, that
offers itself endlessly
to you

who might, now,
hang up and watch

the deft delicate birds,
how they perch
hollow-boned
on frozen branches

or the bold squirrels,
who turn their tails
to the sharp wind
to eat what is offered

or the soft supplication
of deer nosing
the last green grass
beneath accumulating snow.

Some will be dead tomorrow,
but in those lives
not one moment
wasted.

Let affliction be, and death come;
let it find you no longer holding for
the treatment, or the cure —
as if your slow dying were an emergency —

but released finally
to the gorgeous impersonal world
of wild and perishable things

that answers you immediately
that welcomes you wordlessly
though you are nothing
important
at all.

 

 

 

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Tags: aging, creative writing, death, doctors, dying, hold, illness, impersonal, medicine, nature, poem, poetry, sickness, spirituality, telephone