Butterscotch Budino (Photo by Carl Black athttps://www.flickr.com/photos/mentalize/13574138793)

Dear Readers, poet Martha Silano died last week. She was a friend of a friend, and a friend bought me a book of her poems, which I loved. Martha died of ALS, otherwise known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and had lost both her parents in the space of a few months in 2020. But look what she’s left us!. May her memory be a blessing. Holding her in my heart.

When I’m on the Bed

called death, I hope
to be thinking about
the texture of the bucatini
at Campiello, how they seated us
in the bar by the pizza cooks, but when we asked to sit elsewhere

they put us beside
a giant strangler fig
with fake orchids we thought were real.
Al dente, which I pronounced al Dante, in honor of my nephew,
in honor of the circles of hell, my heritage. When I’m on the bed called death

I hope I recall your smile that evening
when you learned budino means pudding,
a butterscotch pudding, which we more than managed
despite finishing our entrées. In la stanza della morte, shoving off
my mortal foil, may I be dreaming of butterscotch pudding, the feel of
my hand

on your back, recalling the call you made
from a mile down the beach to tell me there were no
yellow hilly hoop hoops, greater cheena reenas, or froo froostilts.
I walk back to the car while you call again, this time to tell me you found
a flock of dunlins and semipalmated sandpipers. There’s an actual flush toilet

at the parking lot! And potable water! And my love calls again,
this time to say he’s nearing the path to the parking lot. No, I don’t have
the keys to the car or a single coin, but I’ve got water, binoculars, and my phone,
a little notebook to write down the species—tricolored heron, royal tern, wood stork—
which I’ll add to my list of what to think about when I’m on my giant bucatini platter of a bed.

Is This My Last Ferry Trip?

Is this the last time I’ll admire the guys
in their neon-yellow slickers, guiding us
to our parking spots before we head up

two flights to the passenger deck,
to the cafeteria where a man in a black derby
and black suspenders nods and smiles

as he nibbles popcorn? In honor of this maybe
last trip to San Juan Island, the last time
I hear that somber wail of a horn,

I’m gonna go see if there’s anything I can eat,
and of course there is: Ivar’s clam chowder,
just what the nutritionist ordered:

extra cream, extra butter, tiny potatoes I easily swallow.
Two spoons: one for me, one for the man
otherwise known as my personal

representative. When the time comes, he will help me administer
the cocktail that kills, but until then it’s The Marvelous
Mrs. Maisel, his book about Vronsky and Anna,

my book about the journey to the Higgs boson,
while our daughter calls to remind us
to take pictures of things

she can draw—a sprig of rose hips, a clump of serviceberries.
A deer she nicknamed Chewy. Bellies full of chowder,
we almost forget one of us is dying.