I cry in the sterile room

Lynn Finger

where you are folded into a napkin white bed.
“car accident,” “some brain damage.” Ventilator,
monitors, IVs, surround you, a broken nautilus.

My hands shake while silence bleeds. Roses someone
sent are soft & grey in their vase on the table. Drying.
I toss them. I have to get rid of something.

The chair jabs my back like a bad tooth ache.
You are thin & still under the squared off sheets.
Now a bird flies straight into the windowpane.

I turn to look & see her on the ground outside, limp
feathers dotted in yellow & grey flecks. She lies on
torn bits of snow. I want to make her into an omen,

just like your machines are, breathing slowly for you,
always on time with the answer. I look at my iphone.
There’s twenty yellow birds listed on the internet

& she doesn’t look like any of them. She is one of so many
lost answers that plunge into closed windows. I watch
her thrash in the bushes. Eventually she steadies herself,

ready to fly. I wish you & I could lay together by the fire
again, like we did at the first. We drank melted chocolate.
Your lips tasted like a peppermint and cocoa. We were the flames.

Now you are as distant as a drifting planet. I want
to call all the people who have faded away from me. Or
did I from them? I wonder what to say to someone

who isn’t here, like you. You are present this whole time
but not as a witness, not to anything taking place now.
Nothing touches you. There’s glass between us.

Just like the bird that strikes the air & flies hard into it,
she’s not lost, she knows there’s a way. Someday you may
open your eyes. Until then I throw away your dead roses,
& watch the omens that shatter like shadows in your wake.