Hannibal Crosses the Alps
July 1957

Eugene Minard

A filigree of smoke
Dies in the upper reaches
Of a cheap, brass lamp.
The horse teeth
Of the Irish woman laugh.
The small man chokes.
Her teeth withdraw beneath her lips.
The cancer breaks from the bone
To flower in the blood.
He cannot hold
The urine from the sheets.

It grows each week 
In a moist, steam heated room.
The radiator whistle is several
Tones too low.

The dust quivers in the rising heat.
The old, cut flowers fade.
She prods the cigarette
About the coffee cup and puts it out.

The pillows they had loved
Crowd about his head.
The smoke repeats at the border
Of the brown lampshade.

My uncle asks her please to stop.

The once sweet smelling pillows 
Close him in,
And he tents under plastic.
The opaque metal hides
Whatever gas is there.
No one may smoke.
What strange things ride
Those tubes into his nose?

His mother props his head 
So that he cannot see the 
Ferns thread about the pale
Carnation on the window sill.
The empty tubes
Drop slack against the metal frame.
The nurse wheels 
The apparatus from the room.

The air quivers from the heat.
My eyes ache and my shoulders bleed
As the pigeons' claws nestle in my flesh.
My mother laughs on Florida's built beach.