Life Goes On

by Jim Tilley

for those who still live, as in Brueghel’s painting
of the farmer plowing his field
and the distant ship sailing onward as Icarus,
too young, plunges into the sea.

It’s what my sister-in-law’s family keeps trying
to convince themselves, especially her husband,
to whom she bequeathed
the bonsai on the living room table,
her memorandum to the surviving
with its signature signs — “thrive” and “inspire” —
rooted as deeply as she could force them
into the pebbles filling the ceramic pot
that houses the tiny tree and the miniature plastic canine
she placed there to remind him of the dogs
she nurtured to the end and whose continuing care
she’s passed along.

Freed from the bondage of her dread disease,
he’s made some changes. The plywood plank
that covered his billiards table, never bare,
always overlaid with a deep-rose linen cloth,
has been removed, interred somewhere in the basement.
That death shroud gone, the dining room
is a living room again, no longer the shrine
where the family took its last meal together
as she lay in bed a shrunken figure,
finally crucified by the cancer that overtook her
lungs and brain and spine as soon as it could solve
the challenge of the miracle drugs
the doctors had hurled at it.

At the end, she listened to her sister give her
permission to let go, then lay in bed waiting for hospice
to pronounce her what everybody, for months,

had plainly seen, and stayed a little longer
for the funeral home to cart her away
and turn her into ash.

The pool table, restored to its sunken surface
of deep-rose felt, is where he now expresses his stirrings
in shots stroked with either a light touch, the way
he caressed her hair after it had grown back,
or, on random cue, an angry poke, firing balls
to ricochet off banks in search of
their own resting places.

Into the backyard terrace, he’s anchored a mesh cage
and grass mat for practicing golf, a game
she attempted half-heartedly, at which she never excelled
and therefore chose not to play.

The rails he had installed along the hall stairway
he’s left in place, only ever needed by her,
yet now used by all, if only
for the short-lived comfort gained by sliding hands
along the wood she clutched, her knuckles white,
while she could still walk.

Her beloved dogs, Cassidy and Sundance,
never his as much as hers,
have nearly become their old selves.
Blind Cassidy still knocks into the same things;
Sundance, suffering from Addison’s disease,
still receives the daily doses of steroids.
Early on, they sensed that she would be leaving
for the shelter of another place.
No longer do they look for her,
nor stand and wait.