Five years ago they said she had five years.
At Christmas they told her it would be her last.
She asked each time, flirted, bargained, asked again,
gambler who stubbornly keeps playing red.
I’ve never known her be on time before.
Also, she’s not behaving sensibly,
squanders energy, then crashes, makes big plans
for future dates she is not going to see.
She’s running out of runway, but hasn’t reached
for the brakes. If I were in her place
I would be more… I know what I’d be.
I’d be that zipliner who so took to heart
the warnings not to come barreling into home
that she started braking halfway, and found herself
dangling over rainforest, prudent, stuck.
~
My friend’s death says be ready, he’s on his way,
calls hours later to say he’s had a few
with the boys and really shouldn’t drive.
My friend’s death calls her drunk at 3 a.m.
to read the ten-page poem he’s written for her.
She can hear another voice in the background.
My friend’s death texts that before they can go out
he has to pay a bunch of parking tickets —
can she help out? She reaches for her purse.
~
She’s dying too fast and each stage takes too long.
This slow decline, this hanging over treetops
isn’t her style. It would be more like her
to say the hell with handbrakes,
to be a bright streak over the forest dome
to scatter the bright ones waiting on the platform,
laughing, whizzing full tilt into home.
–
Susan Blackwell Ramsey’s work has appeared in such journals as The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, The Indiana Review, and Best American Poetry 2009. Her book, A Mind Like This, won the Prairie Schooner Poetry Book Prize. She lives in Kalamazoo, which does exist.