JEMontclair – One half a poem

Several days later
The doctors told him
There was nothing more they could do.
No treatment they know of
That they haven’t tried.

“Well it’s all over for me,”
He said when I spoke to him on the phone.
He resists
As always
My suggestions of alternate treatment.
He is stubborn
In his belief in Western Medicine
As the only way –
Or no-way.

On a no-way street
Driving Fast
In the driving rain
With no windshield
Only –
He’s sitting in the backseat
This reckless car
Drives itself.

I have had this nightmare before
Only it was me
Now it’s him
And he is wide awake
To his helplessness
His incurable temporal existence.
“One thousand kisses,” he said
As he had innumerable times
When I was growing up.
Measuring a father’s love
For his daughter in kisses.

“You know,” he says
“I counted once
and it’s closer to 2,000.”
And I think to myself
He has far underestimated
For twenty thousand
Seemed to me
To be closer to the truth.

– JEMontclair December 10, 2013