Love, still hiding, might blow in tonight, through a portal in the music and uplift him

Often the poems in JAMA suck a lot, but occasionally there is a really good one. Like this one: I can't stop reading it.

His Last Season

Still courting lymphoma, intending

to flirt again tonight with a dozen

exotic neoplasms, bones cooked

for years to a brittle foam in smoke

and ethanol, he leads with his big-liver

pre-diabetic belly and tangos

out the door after dinner, heart

harassed to an adequate squeeze where it sags

on his heaving diaphragm. He wheezes

toward the car to cart himself

downtown once more to Ibiza

for the evening Flamenco show. He knows

he's riding on hopes worn past all traction,

bald as the radials barely holding

his Buick to the rain-slicked road. He skids

like a hepped-up kid when he pulls in, pops

a cigarette between his lips for the half-

a-city-block walk to the door, and once

inside, he's looking—

          Love,

still hiding, might blow in tonight

through a portal in the music and uplift him

on the cadences of the talk with a woman

he's about to meet. Love could pour

through the alley between the crumpled towers

of his lungs, stir high all at once

the tossed-out scores, loose papers,

the unsigned, unfinished stories

of his lost days, rediscovered,

alive even now in this his last season,

not because he's earned Love's gift

with any courage or devotion,

nor has his suffering deserved it, but

the muse (Some evenings, she observes

the dancers from the tall gold curtains . . . )—

she could return, to return the uncertain

kiss he left, the night of his first

whiskey, on the lips of the girl

he never saw before or since,

to welcome him at last to his own

disappearance, to dance with him once

while his stretched spirit still sticks

to his guts, or for no human reason.

--

Jed Myers, MD, Seattle, Washington