Lifeguard

Your days in the dark mute
before the television dozing
in your wheelchair
in a room
that stinks of
incontinence

I want to swim you back
like a lifeguard
my arm a bandolier across
your frail chest beneath
the arm made useless
by the worst fall

(Why did you,
why did we,
let them pick you up?
Stay down: This life is over.)

Swim you back past
the college professor
who would never
have let you exist
like this

past the young father
who played horse for
the little girl riding
his back the daughter
with his eyes

to your own childhood
a thin serious boy
building crude telescopes
to ponder stars
in a darker sky

Swim you back to
the diapers you would outgrow
(not those you wear now)
through my grandmother’s womb
the soft salt of that small ocean

to an infinite
beach warm even
at night lay you there
gently relieved at last
of your specificity

a weightless grain
that would
become my father

whose body instead
I leave again
in that dark room
pausing in the beige
institutional hall
to regurgitate

what we allow
shocking my heart
back to something
I might call life

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Tags: aging, creative writing, death, loss, love, nursing homes, parents, poem, poetry, spirituality