Leo: Consider potential problems with the itinerary. Postpone unnecessary deviations.
Monitor traffic and conditions. Adjust your route as you go.
Capricorn: Home could get chaotic. Make repairs or improvements to handle a blockage.
Planning pays off. Your greatest strength is love.
You’d fought that bad heart for forty years
And rallied over and over despite predictions,
Amazing the cardiologist, the kidney doc. Outlived
A bunch of them. Defied the odds. Your dad
Dead at 52. Each birthday year ending in a
Zero you knew was final. You never thought
You’d make it this far, but still you hoped
For more. Revoked Hospice when they denied
Your treatments and struggled on, getting
Stronger every morning, weaker every afternoon.
You’d bought a cemetery plot last summer, wanting everything
To be orderly as befits a private person. All your
Tools arranged just so, papers filed in the metal cabinet.
So nothing would be lost by chance. Yet we were
Abandoned lovers who fought for years over power
And ended up in a truce that left us breathless.
That final night you called me and stood up
Straight as the man you were, demanding
Give It To Me, gesturing with one hand.
I asked over and over what was it you wanted
And got no answer, only Give It To Me like a command.
Not a sip of water, not Ensure, not to use the urinal,
Only Give It To Me repeated and repeated. What was it
You so fiercely wanted? A painkiller that worked?
A memory? A whim? Or simply more life?
Uno Mas. One more day with sunshine at the window.
You shuffled that morning with your walker
Headed for the bedroom and the commode,
Then suddenly crashed down—you who’d only fallen
Once years ago, cleaning the gutters when the ladder broke.
Today, you said I can’t get up. I tried to lift you,
Got you sitting, but you said I can’t and slumped back
Upon the carpet. I said Relax. Someone is coming
To help me get you up. I can’t get up, you repeated, then
Give It To Me, reaching out as if to grab
The diminishing light, staring at me
unseeing.
Give It To Me, you said, and then you died.
Joan Colby (1939 – 2020) was a poet whose work was deeply rooted in nature, and her love of horses and birds. She published over 25 books, including The Salt Widow and The Kingdom of the Birds, both of which were published in the last few months of her life. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications including Poetry, Atlanta Review, GSU Review, Portland Review, Gargoyle, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, Mid-American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Kansas Quarterly, Minnesota Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and many others. A native of the Midwest, she bred and raised Thoroughbred horses on a small farm in Northern Illinois.