Fiddlers at the Desert Valley County Care Center

Among physicians rich in their death watch In hallways crowded with locked wheelchairs, Cradles of a century’s platitudes, The stale air smelling of disinfectant And weeping wounds enough to stupefy nurses, Among the staring insomniacs of the day room, The stroke victims on their rented gurneys, Complaining orderlies and rattling carts Among these in this place my father lay At the end of everything In the curved landscapes of white sheets Abandoned finally by parents, his son, The loyal company, old friends, his death A sign of other deaths too soon to come Unable to recall one life, his thoughts, Features, he lay unknown to himself, The tall hunter of pheasants out with his boy In vellum corn and brassy orchards In an autumn that never was, the proud White-collared Ford employee lay on a bed Too short for legs tattooed with red burn-rings From daily syringes of Cytosar Considered useless, still a requirement For state funding for a body described Leukemic waiting for Saturday's fiddlers Who came to raise the spirits of the dead With a music he never cared for turned Suddenly attractive, he found genius, Theirs or his like some lyrical phosphor That shapes itself in the dry night air To make a thing then make it disappear He lay listening to the county fiddlers At the end of every purpose, act and form I leave you here, my father, in perfect accord.