Rumit Pancholi

COUNTING BEFORE DYING

I.
My doctor calls it,
an epistolary syndrome:

residue Brett
pushes away like disease.

He doesn’t believe
in tea leaves:

How many times
do I have to?

Pick splinters from
the bottoms of my feet.

Clean up after
our oasis rattles loose.

Remove knuckles out of a fist,
standard procedure.

Bleed slow
and again.

II.

A hazelnut dream means
a lighter day is looming –

What meaning is there
in the white hospital linen?

Or in the weightless high
after some meth?

Brett, it does work, I am
no longer hungry.

It is shocking how she pins
the exact second of death,

this nurse who misnumbers
our story endings.

Where will we go? What will
we do with our time?

Outside, hospital gooseberry
leaves flap under a piping crow.

III.

My unsung luminary, who
is listening to you lament?

A bruise is undoing itself
inside my body.

You look faint. Parts of you
subsist in me.

That is why you’re here,
he is why you’re here.

Brett calls it rite of passage,
flared shipwreck,

tallying of cosmos; I call it
blowing out candles

at a vigil, forking
roads, orchestrated silence.

Rumit Pancholi is a second-year MFA student at the University of Notre Dame. His work has been published in Banyan Review, The Clemson Poetry Review, Gertrude, Santa Clara Review and Emerson Review, among other places. Recently, He is also the winner of the 2007 Midwest Chapbook Award through Green Tower Press / The Laurel Review.