Cephalophore
St. Denis of Paris,
patron saint of migraines, be my guardian. Teach me too
to walk this world
without a head. Like you, to carry it gently as a newborn.
Early this morning
my daughter Lucy called me as she was walking home from
the pediatric intensive
care unit where she works as a senior resident. “One of my patients
died last night,”
she told me. “Another is circling the drain. Both fourteen years old.”
I said whatever
a father is supposed to say to reassure his child,
who grew up
too fast, that the world is still a place worth living in.
Let me hold
my aching head like a lantern, shine its unshuttable
blind eyes
into the darkness around us. St. Denis, speak through me. Help me
tell Lucy, the root
of whose name in Latin means light, to forgive herself
for not being able
to save that fourteen-year-old girl. For not knowing what to say
to the girl’s grieving
family. For having to say to the other fourteen-year-old’s parents
that their son
may not make it through the night. Let our bare feet forgive
the glass shards
we walk on. Let the man bleeding out in the gutter forgive
the hit-and-run
driver. No amount of morphine or fentanyl is going to ease
the pain
of being here, then not being here. I am a man walking around
city streets at dawn
without his head. I hold it like a ventriloquist holds
his dummy.
It says stupid things. I am still learning to forgive myself for living
while others
die. The monitor keeps reading the fourteen-year-old boy’s heart rate,
blood pressure, oxygen
saturation, respiration, body temperature. The numbers keep
fluctuating. The wavy
oscillating lines are the scribbles I at four years old
once drew in a blank
notebook to show my mother I too knew how to write letters
and words that had meaning.
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