Windmills

Asking him why he’s here today, he pauses for a moment

to stare at the obviousness of my question

and directs my line of sight to the dialysis machine

with its spinning pumps.

 

He looks arboreal as if he were some weak

allegory for genealogy,

his face heavy and swollen.

 

He imagines that he can escape by closing

his eyes so the insides turn white,

deracinate himself for once.

 

Together we stare at the windmills as they are churning

the burden of their arms, rigid and brisk.

He sways in smooth pursuit of each blade forgetting

each moment as it arrives.

 

Between breaths, he emerges softly into

reality and just as suddenly submerges

into the diaphanous;

catching answers feels like catching clouds

and I imagine him to be a Billy Pilgrim of sorts.

 

One moment he is in Bellevue;

in another he lies naked with his Freiya

on the beaches of an alternate oblivion

where it is tropical; in another

he extends his weighty wings of flesh

and acrid feathers to fly idly over the Sonoran dunes.

 

 

The machine’s exhalations and his apneic wheezing

create a fugue of sighs and sorrows,

his consciousness rising and setting with each whirring cycle.

Tenuous.

My questions crawl over sands and

arch over landscapes only to find him missing.

 

He is kissing his Freiya.