Gary Kuhlmann

Free Fall Into a Cancer Ward

What beautiful stillness.
This was not what I expected.
I had already seen you succumb to kaliedescopic chemical trips
taking you through nights of astral planes
and sidereal views.
This was different,

so unlike what I had come to accept,
your stories
of hallucinatory helicopters upheaving
your bed night after night,
great blades nicking
the plastic crucifix hung on your bare wall.
Elevated within an engine hum,
you confessed to wondering if
the door was closed or if
you might roll out,
a sleeping bag unravelling past tiny stars,
admitted there might be some small comfort
in the thought of nothingness
in the air,
and then demonstrated, spiralling
downward--howl of wind drawing
your cheeks into hollow shadows,
your eyes into small black bones,
your skin taut against your skull
as if searching for darkness,
tiny roots, dry dirt--how to throw your arms out
to the ground rushing
up to meet you. Only to land

like this, so perfectly, unexpectedly
looking like a bubble that's landed intact on the floor.
I was afraid to touch you.

Disease

There are signs I am not who I want to be:

a rainbow stained in gasoline,
a thin-voiced friend with miles in his eyes,
the prescient realization that permanence is a myth,
that countless lifetimes of apathy sink cedar ankles in the earth,
a quill that's still exactly where it fell,
and the fact that somewhere else
an unmanned rowboat fights the shoreline for release.

After Dinner

I watch him stop to save a moth
from the mower. He crouches
and lifts the moth to his face
like a flame. Delicate, dusty, it flutters
in his hand the way I remember his eyelids
did in fevered sleep, a few inches from my face.

The moth flickers from his hand.
He turns to the mower, lifts the handles,
and misses the swallow turning
toward the moth. He doesn't see
the bitter yellow edge of one wing exposed.

Now the light turns dusty. I can barely see
how he lifts the handles and pushes,
how the blades turn, how he lifts
the mower in the garage,
and in the darkness, watches my face.

Gary Kuhlmann lives, writes, and dreams in Iowa City with his wife and two children. A 1978 graduate of the University of Iowa in Journalism and English, he has worked as a corn detasseler, wedding photographer, newspaper carrier, and commissioned officer in the U.S. Air Force. He's now an editorial assistant for a University of Iowa publication.