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Neck, Zarephath, Spotswood — in every town

      there were houses, in every house there’s a light.

Limits

      The dead man.

      Every now and again, I see him.

      And the wildlife refuge where I worked then,

      the shallow ponds of Leslie Salt Company

      patchworking the San Francisco Bay edges

      and spreading below the hills like broken tiles,

      each pond a different color — from blue to green

      to yellow until finally the burnished red

      of terra-cotta, as the water grew denser

      and denser with salt. Dunlins blew upward

      like paper scraps torn from a single sheet,

      clouds of birds purling in sunlight, harboring

      the secret of escaped collision. And

      that other mystery: how these weightless tufts

      could make it halfway to Tierra del Fuego

      and back before spring’s first good day.

      On those good days, a group from the charity ward

      named after the state’s last concession to saints

      would trudge up the hill to the visitor center,

      where I’d show them California shorebirds

      — a stuffed egret, western sandpiper, and avocet —

      whose feathers were matted and worn to shafts

      from years of being stroked like puppies.

      As I guided their hands over the pelts

      questions stood on my tongue — mostly

      about what led them to this peculiar life,

      its days parceled into field trips

      and visits to the library for picture books

      with nurses whose enthusiasms were always greater

      than their own. Their own had stalled out

      before reaching the moist surface of their eyes,

      some of the patients fitting pigeonholes built

      in my head, like Down syndrome and hydrocephalus.

      But others were not marked in any way,

      and their defects cut closer to the bones

      under my burnt-sienna ranger uniform.

      Maybe I was foolish to believe in escape

      from the future carried in their uncreased palms:

      our lives overseen by the strict, big-breasted nurse

      who is our health or our debts or even

      our children, the her who is always putting crayons

      and lumps of clay in our hands, insisting

      we make our lives into some crude but useful thing.

      And one day a man, a patient who must have been

      supervised by his strict heart, fell down

      suddenly and hard, on his way up the hill.

      Two nurses prodded him on toward the building,

      where he went down again like a duffel bag full of earth

      in front of the reception desk where I was sitting.

      I watched the one male nurse turn pale as ash

      when he knelt to certify the heartbeat

      of this man whose lips were blue and wet.

      The other nurse took the group to the auditorium,

      saying James isn’t feeling very well right now.

      James is sick. Get away from him. Then I heard

      the dopey music of the automated slide show

      behind those doors from which she never reappeared.

      The male nurse was too young to leave stranded

      with a man down on the smooth wood floor:

      his cheek still velvet, his dark fingers

      worrying the valleys of the man’s white wrist.

      He’s okay, he’s breathing, as the man’s skin

      turned gray, his mouth open, a cherry sore

      at either edge. I don’t remember what I did at first,

      I must have puttered off to perform some

      stupid task that would seem useful —

      gathering premoistened towelettes

      or picking up the phone while the nurse repeated

      He’s okay, he’s breathing. But the colors

      got worse until nothing could spare me

      from having to walk my hand in the crease

      of the man’s blue throat, where his carotid

      should have pulsed. Nothing.

      I said You breathe for him and I’ll compress,

      and for a while we worked together like a clumsy

      railroad handcar, me humping at arm’s length

      over the ribs, the nurse sealing his lips around

      the man’s scabbed mouth, while yellow mucus

      drained from James’s eyes and nose and throat.

      Each time the nurse pressed his mouth to the man’s

      like a reluctant lover, the stink of cud

      was on his lips when he lifted up. Sometimes

      he had to hold his face out to the side,

      to catch a few breaths of good salt air.

      Until he was no longer able to choke back his gut

      and asked whether I would trade places with him.

      For a moment I studied the man’s staved chest,

      which even my small knuckles had banged to jelly,

      then the yellow pulp that flecked the nurse’s lips,

      that sour, raw smell from their mix of spit.

      And I said: No. I don’t think I could...

      It’s strange what we do with the dead

      — burning them or burying them in earth —

      when the body always tries to revert to water.

      Later, a doctor called to say the man’s heart

      had exploded like a paper sack: death hooked him

      before he even hit the floor. So everything we did

      was useless — we might as well have banged a drum

      and blown into a horn. And notice how I just said “we” —

      as though the nurse and I had somehow married

      spirits in a pact of gambled blood, when in truth

      the nurse, like the man, rode off in an ambulance,

      the man for a pointless go-round in the ER, the nurse

      for a shot of gamma globulin, while I stood

      in

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