The Glass
I think of it with wonder now,
the glass of mucus
that stood on the table
in front of my father all weekend. The tumor
is growing fast in his throat these days,
and as it grows it sends out pus
like the sun sending out flares, those pouring
tongues. So my father has to gargle, cough,
spit a mouthful of
thick stuff
into the glass every ten minutes or so,
scraping the rim up his lower lip
to get the last bit off his skin, then he
sets the glass down on the table and it
sits there, like a
glass of beer foam,
shiny and faintly golden, he gargles and
coughs, and reaches for it again
and gets the heavy
sputum out,
full of bubbles and moving around like yeast-
he is like a god producing food from his own mouth.
He, himself, can eat nothing anymore,
just a swallow of
milk, sometimes,
cut with water, and even then
it can't always get past the tumor,
and the next time the saliva comes up
it is ropey, he has to roll it in his throat
a minute to form it
and get it up and
disgorge the oval globule into the
glass of phlegm, which stood there all day and
filled slowly with
compound globes and I would
empty it and it would fill again
and shimmer there on
the table until
the room seemed to
turn around it
in an orderly way, a model of the solar system
turning around the sun,
my father the old
earth that used to
lie at the center of
the universe, now
turning with the rest
of us
around his death,
bright glass of
spit on the table, these last mouthfuls.
from The Father by
Sharon Olds
Alfred A. Knopf, New York: 1992
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