Two Poems
Mike Nichols
1985 – A Space Odyssey
I should have said goodbye, seen her off and
began filling her gone-space within myself with the
horror and the tears at the open casket. Then sicking it
back up to make room for more. Goodbye, Mom. See you
later. Much later.
Some families rally round the one with the death sentence,
squeezing all the life they can from the last hours, because the sands
are running fast, in this ornate hourglass that’s been welded to the table.
But I had already sheared off after the initial impact, and our family orbited
each other like worlds lost in our own atmospheres. Isolated, though
spinning through the same dizzying space.
If I had entered the death-room each morning at eight, bringing a hot
breakfast she wouldn’t eat, and read to her from the book of life, might
the text have taught her how to stay? If I’d slipped her an extra pill instead of
slipping them into my pocket would it have changed our orbits and allowed us
to make contact?
The space between us is now unfathomable. I can’t tell in which direction to begin
the search. I don’t know if direction means anything after life. Some days I’m floating
dead in my puffy white space suit, my face frosted with space condensation. Some days I’m
furiously afire and screaming through the void singing my death song while I search. Wretched
with Space sickness. Making room for more.
Helpless
I paddle the blue plastic kayak this time. The light of the sun beginning its descent below
the hills plays magic against the lake’s surface, so that the heads of the children look like nothing
but dark eddies in the rhythmic autumn swells.
I lift a child onboard to rest in front of me. The kayak rolls dangerously, threatens to
throw us. I lift a child onboard to rest in back of me. Tight pored and clammy, brittle fingers by
the dozen soon cling to me and to all 360 degrees of the kayak.
Each new set of fingers make it harder to paddle. The kayak sits impossibly low. Each
stroke a torture of muscles shrieking. Don’t rest, because more dark eddies, exhausted from
doggy-paddling, will soon stop sobbing to sink in somber silence. Me, their salvation.
I beg them, Do the dead man’s float. Their terror won’t let them understand this.
After a while, I am the only one weeping. The sun has abandoned me.
Mike L. Nichols is a graduate of Idaho State University and a recipient of the Ford Swetnam Poetry Prize. He lives and writes in Eastern Idaho. Look for his poetry in Rogue Agent, Tattoo Highway, Ink&Nebula, Plainsongs Magazine, and elsewhere. Find more at deadgirldancing.net.