(Qaddish) by Nancy Bevilaqua

Image | Mikhail Nilov 

 (Qaddish)

    (From the poetry collection Gelyana)

Honestly it’s not the cold

 

the uncertainty of trying    of the mist

around your face.

 

It’s handy to believe that you would save me.

 

I’ve never had much pain to speak of (yours

excruciating

every time)

 

bore the medications and the fevers

well enough    came through    sobered up.

 

What is wrong with me that I should have

so little fear?

The avenue back there: I made my buys

 

decisions for the future is a void     a crack

in waiting (how the light gets in).

I’ve binged on you    exceeded

 

what we gave out to the dying lining up St. Peter’s

or St. Paul’s on Thursday nights in 1989

to all the bankrupt soldiers in the thick of things:

 

Manhattan was a cavity    a drainage in the flow

of what they had expected from it free

to move out if they only had the wherewithal

 

the kind of guidance that one needs to flee.

 

Down here this year the leaves all singed by wind

because the storm was that severe this time

and early.

A cancer now in marks along my mother’s arms:

she’s being drained as well

 

she almost knows it and I’m again a blade in ice too sharp

to just fall through and having watched the prisms

they remind me that I must have taken something different 

than the others did and then I saw 

and then the landscape flattened out so I could see you

waiting and I’ve

no death wish but will be ready any time you’ll have me.

© Nancy Bevilaqua

Nancy Bevilaqua

Nancy Bevilaqua is a poet who has also worked as a caseworker for people with AIDS and as a travel writer. Her poems have been published in West Branch, Whiskey Island, Juked, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Prelude, and other publications. She now lives in Hoboken, NJ, where she is finally realizing her 50-year-old dream of learning to play drums.

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