In the dim of my mother’s dying room, as if
bobbing with her on the snapped plank of a ship
far from any coast—my brothers and I try to keep
our heads from swimming, however we can.
I’m lying on the floor, watching a shadow’s
slow blade slice though our family pictures
on her wall, as she floats in waves of morphine
under a white sheet. Mike sits at Mom’s desk,
lost in his phone’s glow, John kicks back
in Mom’s blue recliner watching divers plunge
one by one off the back of a bright vessel into
black water. I’m pissed he’s distracting himself—
and me—with TV, when our mother is in her
last hours. I don’t want to hear it—that these
monstrous ‘Gods of the Deep’ have poor eyesight
and no sense of color, that we’re not their prey.
I ask him to mute the volume. Fish-out-of-water
breathing they call it in the hospice booklet,
her cheeks now flapping loosely like she’s gasping.
Tonight, the so-called ‘death rattle’ has begun.
To keep from drowning in the sound, I close
my eyes, remind myself the rattle is in her throat,
not mine, and that it’s not hurting her. I imagine
each deep gurgle as something else, like maybe
she’s just taking that best final sip of a milkshake
through a straw. Then I settle on the image of
an old metal percolator, like the one she’d pull out
for parties. Yes, it’s just the sweet dusky music
of coffee burbling in a machine, the gentle sound
of a party winding down. I open my eyes just in time
to catch the silver tank, tangled tubes, panic of bubbles,
a diver thrashing free. Well, you’re about to be
fucking toast—my brother says to himself out loud
the way I’d forgotten he used to when we were kids,
as if people on TV could hear him. Need a mood
ripped to shreds? Just leave it up to John. But then
again—thank God for him—here I was, trapped
in its path, and John just snatched me from its teeth,
enough time to breathe as it glides away from this room,
swallowed by the night sea outside Mom’s window,
leading us to believe it’s gone, not that it’s only taking
a wider berth, not that it will soon be circling back.
Robert Fanning (he/him/his) is the author of five full length collections, Cage; (forthcoming), Severance, Our Sudden Museum, American Prophet, and The Seed Thieves, as well as two chapbooks, Sheet Music and Old Bright Wheel. His poems have been published by Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, Waxwing, THRUSH, The Common, and many other journals. A Professor of English / Creative Writing at Central Michigan University, he is the Founder/Director of PEN/INSULA, an online resource for Michigan poets, and the Founder/Facilitator of the Wellspring Literary Series, where he lives in Mt. Pleasant, MI.