Michael Catherwood

Clinic Haiku
It was so cold and lonely
The crying blue rain was tearing me up.
                                    Jimi Hendrix, “In From the Storm”

The morning sun glows
in chemo-land. A few
of us here are masked,

hooked up to clear bags,
Taxotere and Dex. The sun
slices in and cuts

the dull beige colors
infusion clinics embrace.
The nurse stabs my port.

We all breathe and ache
in simple daily routines,
lives poised like harpoons,

sharp as glass, angry
glares from clear plastic
bags hanging like clouds.

Hemingway

crazy in Cuba, in his casa,
the Finca Vigía drinking 
pills down with whiskey,
walls built outside
his compound, where ghosts
landed, his wives gone,
scattered around the world,
the Pilar, tied up,
docked and ready
for marlin, more drinking,
and each morning
he stood at attention
at the Smith Corona, 
a sentence, then another,
sometimes three,
surrounded
by books and years,
stories and barrooms,
lies and wounds,
a circus of survival,
a compound of trees
strangled by trees,
by walls, by myths,
by lost days
where a young boy
under the sun and in winds
lost in thick forests,
and cooled in streams
moved with life,
where that young boy
stood, who wrote
a world in clean beauty
in simple tragedy.

 

Michael Catherwood’s books are Dare, If You Turned Around Quickly, Projector, from SFA Press, and Near Misses, from WSC Press. He’s a former editor at The Backwaters Press and has been Associate Editor at Plainsongs since 1995. His poems have appeared in Agni, Black Warrior Review, Borderlands, Common Ground, Portland Review, Solstice, and others. Recent poems have appeared in Slipstream, Corpus Callosum, Pennsylvania English, The Misfit, and The Common. He’s a cancer survivor, retired, and lives in Omaha with his wife, Cindy.