Death at a Distance

Edwin Gardiner

Your message hung on the phone line
like his striped shirt blowing
in the last wind of his life:
softly and with dignity.
His facial bones,
and body contours
he allowed to be chiseled
to an insubstantial sharpness
by the flow of chemicals and
the relentless labor of his disease:
both polished his body to dust.
Your life that has breathed that dust
for years will, someday,
carry it to the stars,
where it belongs.


About the poet:

Edwin Gardiner, a urologist, was in private practice for thirty years in San Diego; he did his surgical training at UCSF and NYU-Bellevue Medical Center. "I've written since my undergraduate days at Amherst College but have had only essays and professional monographs published before. From the early 1980s on, I occasionally wrote poetry, but since retiring I've found poetics an essential part of sampling the temperature of my daily life."

About the poem:

The man in this poem and I were friends for many years. This poem was a whisper of condolence to his wife upon receiving a phone call with the news of his death. Though the poem is "occasional" in the sense of being inspired by an event, the act of constructing it became a way for me to transform the sadness I felt, using the biological effects of dying to examine a more generalized transformation of biological matter into the balanced structure of the universe. With his wife as his lover and caretaker, I'm hinting at her related role as a messenger of this larger transformation of us all.

Poetry editors:

Judy Schaefer and Johanna Shapiro

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