Poems
The Diagnosis; How to Die
The Diagnosis
A Wyeth-like impression: snow along the road begins to mount, a doctor's frail voice goes silent. What happens next is anybody's guess. Will he become like his father in that season, befuddled and indignant— oblivion growing by the day? He drives his truck along the highway, past frozen trees, the cemetery walls. Blur of wintering geese on the horizon. He's too young for this affliction, doesn't yet call it a disease. Now he presses on toward a threshold in the distance, forgets the brittle leaves, his father's plot of ground.
How to Die
He said he didn't fear what was to come, or what he'd find inside the world below: good music, a story being spun, and afterwards he'd look right at the soul without a filter, an emanating light inside Forgetting's darkest places, a flow of recollection like a river lit at night, delighted that his body had been shed. He'd finally know the truth of wrong and right, how what is living comes from what is dead: a hatch of golden mayflies in the spring, the vineyard's rain-wet clusters and a red snake in the corn field—every living thing. He'd see why love is like a ladder to the sky, how knowledge in itself is just a wing. He didn't raise his voice, he didn't cry, his few remaining friends were at his side.
Jason Barry holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, where he was a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow, and a Master's in Applied Linguistics from the University of Oxford. His chapbook, Fossil & Wing, won the Wil Mills Award from the West Chester University Poetry Center, and his work has been featured on The Slowdown.