Relics

The nurses could set their watches by me,

trekking to the bathroom every half hour,

left hand braced against the IV pole as I

rolled it to the toilet. A metronome beep

tolled each time the infusion pump delivered

a pulse of water into the vein crossing

the front of my elbow, a sound I barely

noticed anymore, my second day in the hospital.

The tiny plastic colander in my hand

was supposed to catch my stone tumbling out.

A splintered barrel pitching over the falls—

I hoped—landing rock bottom in the basket

while I stood before the toilet bowl.

Twice I thought I flushed it from my body

in a sloshing stream of urine. Just tiny blood

clots, the head nurse said. She seemed

as disappointed as I was. I fell asleep

knowing the doctor planned to operate

the next morning if the stone still was stuck

inside me. Later that night, awakened

by a dream, my bladder bursting with cloudy

urine and blood clots, I rose from bed

for the bathroom. Passing a neighbor’s room,

I winced at the “Droplet Warning” sign

still taped to her door: “Prior to entering:

Clean Hands, Mask and Eye Protection.”

(Covid, for sure, as if the staff in HazMat

suits weren’t a dead giveaway.)

As I shuffled past the nurses’ station—

again—in my light-brown hospital socks,

white silicon treads on the bottoms of my feet

for traction on linoleum, I recalled the dream

fragment that roused me from sleep:

my mother was trying to get into my

glass-doored hospital room. Her hair

swooping in the tight-curled Italian bob

she wears in my parents’ lone surviving

honeymoon photo, Niagara Falls 1956.

Short-sleeved, white-bloused arm stretched

across a safety railing, pale water clouds

and grayscale foam billowing behind her.

Dead so long now, 22 years, she’d forgotten

how to open a sliding door. And I wasn’t

much help in the dream, unable to lift myself

from bed. The two of us frozen, looking

at each other through impenetrable glass.

Out of nowhere, she opened her mouth

to sing, as if her voice alone could slide

the doors apart. I woke before I heard a single

note. Drapes pulled across the doors,

pain still shredding my left flank, a jagged

pebble still lodged somewhere between

my kidney and bladder. Two decades since

she died and I don’t remember the sound

of her voice strongly enough to even dream it—

which shouldn’t surprise me, I guess,

since I’ve only kept one recording of her and

haven’t listened to it since she died: a cassette

from 1996, an afternoon she spent recounting

stories from her childhood for new poems

I was writing. Shocking, back then, to hear

my mother say the old men in her neighborhood

supported Mussolini until the U.S. declared

war on Italy. How proud she was to tell me

her father read Italian newspapers out loud

for the neighbors who were illiterate. That old

cassette sits in my desk drawer as if just another

object, an artifact. I can’t bring myself to play it,

even after the dream, afraid if I hear that dead

voice once more, I’ll lose her all over again.

The weirdest part of the dream should’ve been

my mother trying to croon apart the hospital doors.

But she sang her way out of breakdowns all the time

when I was a kid—she once confessed to me

she remembered almost nothing before

the age of fifteen—Italian folk songs from her

childhood, tunes so old I assumed they already

were relics by the time she learned them.

She sang standing at the kitchen sink, staring up

at the cupboards, possessed, water pouring

over the dishes, her back to me. I wanted

to keep it like that, stay out of her way

—long enough, at least, for her to stop

singing and get back to talking to herself.

“I don’t know whether I’m coming or going,

Anthony,” she’d say, once the storm had passed.