In the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was lined up by the fire with the old people. I was just there trying to get used to my new existence as a doorstop. And as I waited, before me those loved ones of the older generation toppled over one after the other. These, my elder statespeople, went down like nations, like all those countries they spent so many years of their lives worrying woud fall to communism.
___
At each pasing I've grown hopeful: maybe they've left me their wheelchair.
(To the tv medium in reruns: Bring out the new dead.)
___
Among the castoffs outside the parking lot's closed Goodwill hut, one day I saw a folded-up wheelchair lying down by itself. The sight of it there gave me pause, and I thought about taking it, but that would be considered stealing.
___
What is it like, you ask, to be too ill to walk into a cemetery? All I wanted was to see where some ancestors are. For crying out loud, not many cemeteries and only a few gravesites. But terrible confusion and more and more pain so I end up at a stone begging a woman I never knew, who is both distant cousin and great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth McIntire, for mercy.
Believe me, at every rural cemetery gate, I'm scouting out a resting place.
___
I lie in the grass staring at the sky, and I think, crazily, the only one who can save me now is Miroslav Holub, my biological father.
Miroslav Holub was a Czech poet and immunologist. When I discovered his writing, I felt a kinship.
___
At each pasing I've grown hopeful: maybe they've left me their wheelchair.
(To the tv medium in reruns: Bring out the new dead.)
___
Among the castoffs outside the parking lot's closed Goodwill hut, one day I saw a folded-up wheelchair lying down by itself. The sight of it there gave me pause, and I thought about taking it, but that would be considered stealing.
___
What is it like, you ask, to be too ill to walk into a cemetery? All I wanted was to see where some ancestors are. For crying out loud, not many cemeteries and only a few gravesites. But terrible confusion and more and more pain so I end up at a stone begging a woman I never knew, who is both distant cousin and great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth McIntire, for mercy.
Believe me, at every rural cemetery gate, I'm scouting out a resting place.
___
I lie in the grass staring at the sky, and I think, crazily, the only one who can save me now is Miroslav Holub, my biological father.
Miroslav Holub was a Czech poet and immunologist. When I discovered his writing, I felt a kinship.
