Intubations of Immortality

JERRY BRADLEY 

May 20, 2020

from Recollections of an Early Case of Coronavirus

My curse is but this sleep and a forgetting. 

The things I have seen I see no more. 

What comes will go, and wherever I go

Is away from the glory of the earth.

I believe the birds still sing their joyous songs

And in the heart of May keep their holiday

While the trees remember something gone.

Where are they now and those dreams?

As I lie in near nakedness, I dream

Of home, the first prison-house

And its light from which all else flowed.

That was the light of common day.

Though the earth still has its own pleasures,

My homely nurse does all she can

To see that the glories I once knew are

Mirrored in this imperial palace to which I came.

At my feet is some little plan or chart,

Some fragment from my dream of human life;

My exterior semblance no longer attests

To my soul’s immensity as it readies for its eternal sleep.

We toil all our lives to recall the darkness lost,

To find the darkness of the grave.  This bed

Is a lonely one where I lie like a child

To whom the years have brought their yoke.

I have become the blank misgivings of a creature

No longer moving in a world unrealized.

I rest in a season of calm weather, inland,

Though I have sight of that immortal sea.

Nothing is likely to bring back the hour

Though I live under its habitual sway.

For the flowers to bloom now is mean,

And all my thoughts are too deep for tears.

JERRY BRADLEY, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, is University Professor of English and the Leland Best Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Lamar University. He is the author of 8 books and has published in New England Review, Modern Poetry Studies, Poetry Magazine, and Southern Humanities Review. He lives in Beaumont, Texas.