Nameless

They incant a list of hospitals — many names of old men — where to jail her now — her five children — four opinions — an indifference the size of a sickle — her body flooded with blood-thinners — they worry the doctors may inflame her further — pick gnats out of their noses — hide them inside her bellybutton — grandchildren believe in names — only doctors can cure her — yet from Apollo she is conveyed back like a convict — many numbers assigned to her body — she has this much left here — this much left there — all together not much left anywhere — they take her to Fortis — she returns slimmed to a shaving of oak — then BL Kapoor — Deen Dayal refuses to admit her — they have too many dying mothers — back home she swells again — a house of silverwater — in her elbows thighs palms — I am beginning to lose — the sense of smell to sniff out an ending — Ganga Ram — six ICU nights — their suspicions lie somewhere between kidney failure and liver cirrhosis — organs you can have a piece of and still keep breathing — they are unsure — it could be anything — her age — only seventy-three — the exact number of seconds it took the Challenger to explode — we bring her back home — her last wish — her face a beaten wing — how do you know the dying haven’t died already — she already smells like woodsmoke — a child of Partition — for the first year of her life Dida did not have a name — her family eaten by the hunger for refuge — she spoke before she was spoken to — these are her last days — the wounded-gazelle fan in harmony with her lungs — silence sewed to our lips — the doctors’ lips — there is no name for her suffering

the way waiting becomes an injury

Nothing could stop you. 

You went on with your dying.

—Mark Strand

sleep is where the dying go for practice

but her eyes like wheels

roll to show white and never close 

the bait of dreams

too skeletal and she knows even if

blackness butchers

the birdcall cutting through traffic

the flare of bodies 

hissing through the room the particular

ache under her knee

she will not dream dreams are for those

who have flesh to fill

with bones and color something to other

from what is real life 

like wound from amputation 

she pries

finger and thumb finger and thumb

from the throat

of each little bead her mother made

out of stones

from a mountain now vanished

like her and her

father her husband her hometown

unlike the night

so reliable is pain it comes for every color

with prayer or without