My grandfather in India died,
my dad paged me to say,
at home in his village
across from the mandir.
Facedown, hugging the earth, naked—
his head southward, arms spread in front,
giving himself to the G-o-D
tattooed on his left forearm.
He had fallen the day before,
refused the hospital even with fever.
Instead, he rested, handfed, and slept.
He used to read my palms
tracing the lines of life, love, fate
He must have known.
That message, thick with gravity
reached me while I wrote the death note—
of an eighty-three year old,
bedbound, demented woman
whose finale sunk into sepsis,
acidosis, atropine, then pulseless.
Her body floated up around the plastic latticework
that encased her, tubes trailing
Her throat, bladder, neck, arms, belly.
The blank grey sheen of death crept over her face
before we could break her ribs with chest compressions.
What of this earth,
swallowing two lives today?
I remember an ant weaving its way
through a buttonhole
close to my grandfather’s throat
until it found skin to trail along
the curve of his neck.
He did not brush it away.