I

Last year my sister-in-law planted

pink heather on my balcony

for me to discover

when I came home from the hospital

This year there’s only

waterlogged leftovers

of summer’s flowers

Death isn’t a stranger

It’s here already

On a cellular level it happens every second

Fragments of the body

are let go to make survival possible

II

At 4 a.m. I woke up unable to focus my eyes

Luckily, I called the nurse even though

I didn’t know what was wrong

only that it was bad

Two young nurses

one on each side of my bed

watched the readings in tense silence

while one squeezed the bag of saline

into my arm as fast as she could

The readings leapt about on the screen

They told me to breathe deeply

but the air didn’t arrive

When they wheeled me into the elevator

to go down to surgery again

they kept telling me to breathe

I saw my face in the elevator mirror

Eyes like holes

in waxy skin

almost vacated

Yet I was in there

and

I lived

and I’m still here a year later

The levels of healing are endless

Or perhaps it is the damage

that is endless

Filo pastry

crumbles everywhere

III

My grandfather was kind and said

the inadvertent Finnish flag

on the boat I’d drawn for his October 80^th was appropriate

since he grew up speaking Finnish

He didn’t mention how Norwegian schools

beat it out of him

He was pale and yellowish

Yes, death was there

but he was there too

It was the last time I saw him alive

For months I dreamed of his dead body

being wheeled around on a stretcher

by strangers

IV

Can death be a friend?

We won’t get away anyway

But each time I hear that someone

took the early exit off the highway

as my old doctor used to say

I feel sick

As Sappho says

Death must be evil

otherwise the gods themselves would die