He who lay beside
me, as in twin-bed connubiality, is
gone. I sweat through
nightmare: they have wheeled him
to the basement to be burned in
a furnace that shoots him in a blast,
like fever, to our room. I try to remember
the codes lovers whisper across the night
spaces between their beds. I
think of how the body,
which cannot bear the weight now
of its simple functioning unassisted,
may still love, though no one loves it.
And so
night after night I
keep drugged watch as they wheel
in the barely alive and wheel out the barely dead.

It is wrong somehow not
to learn their names or
share comforts like photographs
or home remedies.
So I keep watch. When the wheels
come for me, I make an effort. I sit up and say to one whose name I may not yet
have memorized:
   The wheels you hear when
   they are come for you will
   drive the chariot of heaven
   and push you beyond loss
   and the professions of stars.

Author Bio

A longtime teacher, Carl Sennhenn is the Associate Dean of Humanities at Rose State College, Midwest City, OK, where he teaches English and Humanities. He has taught creative writing for senior adults and children, is the faculty editor of the RSC anthology Pegasus, has published two chapbooks of poetry (and is desultorily at work on a third).

Another poem by Carl Sennhenn
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