Third Cup

Salem Hospital, where Timm died on April 18.

May 19, 2008

In the way of every Irish triad
that measures out a full heart
there are three cups of song
on our O’Cobhthaigh family crest,
each filled with a quality
which together pours out
all a singer must delight
his audience with each night,
boating through three chambers
of the chest -- laughter, longing,
sleep -- before the last bell
in the hall’s been rung.

Three depths, three augments,
three thirds of heart
we must learn to play on
the harp we carry to all shores,
riding that wild dolphin art
to the last full-booming shore.

I have learned some things
about the first two cups: about
the joys of childhood,
about desire and its ends.
I have tossed the gold ball of a
child’s smile and held it
on the sill like a welcoming
breast full of milk; I have
sung the lays of quest
and unrequieted desire,
sailing isle for isle
in search of a woman
whose face merged with
God at dusk and woke
next to my wife.

But your death is the first
that bids me learn to sing
from the third cup of
the fully poured-out heart.
You, third brother, are the
bearer of that awful grail,
the dread singer I must
listen to complete me
education in this
scriptorium of cups.

Tutor me in the big kid stuff
you adventured first into
like a wild, burning, spiralling arrow,
your death-harrow the womb
which curved the third cup’s
door, the wine poured
out from it your blood,
inking this pen I hold today
with the hue of the that
icy distant land, the furthest
a man can go in life.

Yesterday I read over your
death report from Salem Hospital,
a hundred faxed pages
of reports and notes, tests and
procedures which failed
to save you that night you died,
inked in cold typefont and
hurried hands’ hotter scrawl.

Through a veil of officialese
and medicalspeak your rough
oracle revealed you in the ambulance,
your heart gone wild in its cage
with a huge clot blocking a door,
urging you to fly away while
the parameds laid on the
defrib paddles once and then
again, the first two of 14 shocks
applied that night trying
to keep you here.

When your heart wasn’t
galloping wild it went too still,
sinking fast through normal
registers down to the flatlines
of death, your pulse and
breath stilling down, your wings
folding, acquiescing to the watery
dark that seemed so peaceful
to you that night 26 years before
you lay on a table in another ER
dying of a terrible head-wound.

Why did you begin thrashing
on your gurney between 1 and 2 a.m.?
Were you fighting back to life
or battling to be set free of it?
Soft restraints were applied to your
wrists, held in place by sandbags
slung below:

Were you trying to wake
from our dream of death
or be freed from the nightmare of life,
no longer the victim of that
survivor’s ego sent you
too far from home in search of it,
a victim and a volunteer,
fearer of relationship and
unbounded adventurer, wounded healer,
lover of beauty in song
and word and perfectly-crafted image?

If music is the stuff of love
then sing on, proclaimed the prince
of “Twelfth Night”; the song
“September 15” which began
your day on April 17 was surely
a wedding march you eagerly joined --
“love in search of a word,” as
the poet Sidney Lanier wrote,
a heart always almost at home.

But who could know such
longing would result in those lonely
hours passing through angioplasty
where they shot stints up your
femoral artery in your groin
and later flailed a balloon catheter
while you failed and failed

until your heart gave up the last ghost
of your life at 2:55 a.m. April 18 2008,
that moment when the docs
gave up and turned away, letting
you row on through that huge blue door,
stilled with that vast wet peace
of the womb all tombs are washed in.

O brother I see you there,
dead at last too damn soon,
my distant twin, the same
height and length and girth as I,
still on that awful table at last,
a grapefruit-sized hematoma
in your groin where
semen once writ wild joys
across the life, your restless caring
hands relieved of wings and fins,
become cold flesh’s stone.

Your last heartbeat sounded
your name one last time, just
a blip on the monitor then gone,
a level wave scrolling across
the screen again and again
till some living hand reached out
and switched the machine off.

Around your fatefully stilled
and solitary body a silence formed,
great as the ocean we heard
inside the wave-crash of our
mother’s womb, saline, aquaean,
embracing your torn spirit
and taking you home.

That room was empty now
even of you, the docs and
nurses working to save lives
in adjacent rooms: a single
light glowed over your body
on a gurney which soon would
be rolled into the morgue’s
big chill where you’d be kept
till being shipped out to the
organ harvesters and then
to the funeral home

where we caught up with you
days later
at last, at last.

Dad said yesterday on the phone
that your cornea were grafted onto
two people’s eyes, giving them
both a good eye for the world.
I like to think a man and a woman
each see one way your way,
seeing each other aright at last:

One victory for you, eh bro,
who never got it quite right at love
though saw it in full living color.
May those lucky recipients of your
eyes now see the world with
an O’Cobhthaigh’s too-full heart,
may they fall in love with the world
as you saw it through the grand lens
of your Nikon.

O there is more under heaven
and earth than is dreamt by
mere philosophies of art;
this death-song is in love
with the stony harrows of your
final gesture on that dread gurney
at 3 a.m. -- a hand that hangs
limply down as if to reach
one of those flowers you
photographed so eloquenty,
living on now in the garden I will tend
as long as I breathe here.

You have so much to teach me, bro.
I’ll never write it fully down
though the third cup is pouring
at full drench, a summer night’s
wild storm no heart sustains
though something may yet quench
the spirit’s joy of heading home at last.