Three Poems by Dick Westheimer

My Father Transformed by Dying

I sat with him alone in the hospice room.

The breathing machine noises made a nap-drowse 

muddle of me and I nearly lost sight of his star receding 

from here to some galaxy far from where he was, 

a place utterly unlike the stern man I knew, 

who was so cool to the touch. He would often 

cite Kant—that it was better to think than feel, 

until he suffered a private revival on learning 

of his cancer, a death sentence in three quick acts.

He asked me to call him “Pop” rather than “Father,” 

his feelings, new, under siege—he, now, less a man 

and more a near naked patient with no room to move 

but away, as he became less “star” and more a small 

part of an unknown galaxy, warm in the night sky.

-First published in Rattle

CT Scan Assay

          Load every rift with ore.
               —John Keats

First, there is a body
then its soft parts.
From above a voice
says breathe, now
hold. Now
let go. No good
god would speak
such a thing.
She would say nothing
to be seen here
as the machine turns
its sensor, detects
tissue invisible
unless a tumor,
a mass attached
to the barium-lined,
the X-ray lit.
Now is the time
to look into darkness,
examine oneself
for impurities and for how
much must be smelted
from every last moment,
from each line
from the deep rift left
between now and when
I end, no matter what
the person with the loupe
sees examining
the ore of me,
determines
the denominator
of my days
remaining.

-First published in One Art: a journal of poetry

Weights and Measures

            A small spark may, perhaps, lie hidden.

                        -Motto, Royal Humane Society

A struggle of numbers wages in me. I obsess

with maths – with the mystery of primes,

the growth of exponents, the credibility

of p-values and standard deviations.

Even so, I go outside after a rainstorm and feel

the breeze wash measureless over me,

see a robin not much larger than a wren – whose song

is sweeter by infinity. I walk with Stu, a friend since when

our toddlers clasped tight to our chests, their incalculably

curious fingers twined in our whiskers.

I recall to Stu the emergency room after my heart attack:

The nurse asked me to rate my suffering on a scale

of one to ten. My number-self, thought to ask what

her unit of measure was – pounds or meters or liters

of pain. But math-me was defeated along with reason-me

so I blurted “I have no fucking idea.” She smiled, quipped

“I’ll take that as an eleven.” I let out an animal sound that resembled

a laugh – right before my blood pressure dropped to zero.

She and I both faded from my view even as I grasped

through that silent scrim that this woman’s jest saved me.

When I saw her in the corridor days after surgery, she paled.

“I thought we’d lost you,” she said – and I had no measure

for how much it meant to me she cared–

not an exponent, not an iota, not a million.

She said, as so soft I had to lean in to hear, “I was taught

that even in the dead, a small spark may, perhaps, lie hidden. 

But until I met you, I had no idea

how small small could be.”

Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist, and a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. His poems have appeared or upcoming in Whale Road Review, Rattle, OneArt, Abandon Journal, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and Minyan. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands,
Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by SheilaNaGig. More at www.dickwestheimer.com

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