Bacchanal

You’re not dead yet.  Not dying
in any urgent sense.  Though some evenings
you are all urgency, your skin hot 

and damp.  It’s more than weather, 
though it’s early summer, the gnats 
fierce against the screens.

And who knows what your regimen
of pills induces.  Mom calls this
agitation, and yes, you’re driven

to be in motion, more Bacchanalian rave
than a sure-footed dance, more
frenzied wildness around the fire,

except instead of footwork you’ve got 
limbs churning in your wheelchair, 
the parking brake on.  And instead of fire 

to dance around, you’ve got a growing emptiness 
which I imagine as a whitening spreading 
in your brain like ice.  Or like tree limbs 

that you only discover in summertime 
are dead, persistently gray against 
all the buzzy, feverish frenzy of green.

---

Ann Hudson's first book, The Armillary Sphere, was published by Ohio University Press. Her poems have appeared in Cider Press Review, Orion, Crab Orchard Review, Colorado Review, North American Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is an editor for Rhino, and teaches at a Montessori school in Evanston, Illinois.