Zach Savich


from Études for the Image, or The Cinder Path


Eleven

As you age, they explained, the eye
Casts shadows of parts of the eye
Behind the eye: floaters,
Traces, a flash
So you see inaccurate depths
Depths, however, are greatly aligned
With greater precision
So you see better

*

The feeling of insight without
Specific insight
That specific
Feeling of insight

*

When my sister died, it was complex grief. She’d been worsening for a year. Sores that wouldn’t heal. Losing weight despite calories. Fewer and fewer words, then fewer and fewer sounds.

When she moved to the new facility, one of her few times apart from my mother in fifty years, my mother gave them a page detailing the meanings of various shrieks.

Would she need a feeding tube, to be further immobilized for nutrition?

That would mean increased bedside toileting, bedside everything.

She mostly stayed with her brow on a SpongeBob pillow.

She’d shriek or burble or chew through the gloves she wore to save her fingers from chewing.

She’d chew through the bandana in her mouth that kept her from snapping her teeth.

You could sometimes distract her with a knock-knock joke.

It didn’t matter if it made sense.

*

Knock-knock

the new place was five minutes from my mother’s home
this was a mercy: my mother was having trouble driving
got places by taking multiple rights, too stiff for lefts
worn out, not sleeping, caring for my sister daily forever

and she was having these blanknesses, crashes
she’d be at the store and get “fluttery,” nearly pass out
the state paid for help, few hours a day
but she didn’t like having people in the house

they’d ignore my sister, be on their phones
wouldn’t bathe or wipe her right, it’d need redone
often young and in situations that lead to those jobs
didn’t have a car, so often late, or a car but no license

so outings were out, or lots of kids, caring for parents,
working nights elsewhere, couldn’t make a can of soup
my mom got more worn, preferred days without help
I didn’t know what to hope for

not for days, not exactly

for day by day

*

Knock-knock

For the two years since they moved to Ohio, to be closer to us before it was an emergency, before my mother’s back or knees went, before the worsening worsened—for those years, whenever the phone rang, I expected emergency.

It was sometimes an emergency.

Or it sometimes felt like an emergency, but it was just my mother stressed by, say, a letter threatening the end of services, which, we realized, had been dated and mailed before she’d updated the new forms, so it was null, it was OK, it was just another day.

Another day by day.

I’d brace and be ready for disaster. Felt always in that.

It was sometimes an emergency, but it was sometimes just a rabbit my mother had seen in the yard.

I’d say: I was worried it was an emergency.

I’m sorry, she’d say. It’s just a rabbit.

It’s staring at the woodpile. What do you think it sees?


Twelve


Who’s there?

Sheet music nailed to the brow of an ox. Facing out.

The ox is alive, a live wound. Wandering with this music on its brow.

We can assume the same people who nailed the music to the ox made the musician walk backward and play this song.

Which song?

The song of the ox with sheet music nailed to its brow.

I’m sorry, it’s how some people are. Cruel. To music, musicians, and the ox.

Cruel to the image those in the cart must endure.

We can assume the musicians changed regularly. Because, you know, you could memorize that music pretty fast, walking all day, playing to the ox and the people in the cart.

You wouldn’t need the sheet music for long. Unless the musicians didn’t last.

Describe the instruments you can play backward. Breathing only inward.

Describe the people in the caravan, watching the musician walk backward.

Turning now to landscape.

*

Who’s there?

I didn’t miss any work when she died, though for years, maybe forever, I’d been working in the ways I had—yes to every freelance job, any visiting gig, each administrative post—in part because I knew, one day, her care would be my cost. Whether that feeling, its responsibility, was reasonable or not. It was basic to me, an appointment. What I could do was try to work, in my ways.

And the state and federal support she got, necessary for living?

That was complex enough before the new administration.

Remind me, who are the ones, in myth, condemned to carry their own heads around?

But that’s what we all do.

Grief: your hand must be smaller than this bird to hold it.

 

from Études for the Image, or The Cinder Path, forthcoming from Salon des Refuses

Zach Savich is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Momently (Black Ocean, 2024), and several collections of creative nonfiction, text-for-performance, and cross-genre work, including A Field of Telephones (53rd State Press, 2025). He is the recipient of an NEA fellowship, the Iowa Poetry Prize, and the Colorado Prize for Poetry. He teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art and with the PhD in Creativity at Rowan University.

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