Summary:

This short story begins with a summary of the tale of Guillermo Blake, who believed that "the five senses obstruct or deform the apprehension of reality." The narrator then relates the tale to his own experience: upon visiting his gerontologist for a check-up, he is informed of a procedure that confers immortality. The "immortals" are reduced to living brains within wooden cubes, their bodies having been replaced by "formica, steel, plastics." The narrator tries not to show his horror, but moves immediately to a different part of the country under an alias.

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The narrator is a patient with advanced cancer who has come home from the hospital after being told that "medicine has no hope." Yet, for one night, he strives to overcome his cancer with drink, his "Basic Life Force," and hope.

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This is a description of the last moments of the narrator's ailing grandmother. She is "wrinkled and nearly blind," and protests cantankerously as the ambulance speeds her towards the hospital. However, in a sudden change of character, her last words express how tired she is of looking at the passing trees; her loss of interest in the view parallels her loss of interest in life.

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A man suffers from a disease that "came / from love, or some / such place" (AIDS?). He has come home to his father's house to die. He grows thin, his sores will not heal, family and friends grow distant. While in the kitchen family members discuss how much the illness affects them, the sick man himself is already in hell, "which is / the living room . . . . "

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A short poem in which the speaker enters the X-ray room, braces herself against the cold, lies "suspended in icy silence." She looks at herself from a distance, feeling free, "Even though I'm not, now / Or ever . . . . " She feels the "metal teeth of death bite" but they reject her "One more time" and she returns to the everyday reality of being a sick person lying in a cold X-ray room.

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This splendid poem describes the writer's image of his own death in a very matter-of-fact and conversational style. If he's lucky, he tells us, he'll die in the hospital, surrounded by machines and loved ones. His friends will be there to give him support; he'll be able to tell them how much he loves them. If he's unlucky, however, "as I deserve," he'll just drop dead and not have a chance to say farewell properly. But, whatever happens, he just wants to say "I was happy when I was here . . . . "

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Summary:

The short story considers the final afternoon in the lives of Jeff and Jennie Patton, a frail elderly couple, who have spent their lives as poor sharecroppers, barely able to make ends meet for themselves and their children. While neither is seriously ill, the severities of farming and aging have guided them toward a mutual pact. Today they will put on their finest clothes and then, drive down the dirt road past their neighbors toward a cliff--and death.

The simple story is gripping as readers discover what this couple is about. While they have been defeated by their tight-fisted landlord and by age, their spirits are indomitable. With charm and pathos, the couple fulfills the pledge they made to one another when no other alternative seemed appropriate.

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From the mundane to the profound, from the body as physical preoccupation to the body as sacred, the poet explores in 21 highly personalized lines the significance and symbolism of the human body. Washing your feet without giving it a thought means you are in good health; struggling to do it because of overweight is a reminder of mortality. This (any) physical act "should be ritual . . . memorial, meditative, immortal." It conjures up an image of the Degas ballet dancers washing their feet, and then, remarkably, that " . . . they also seemed to be washing God’s feet."

But the creative power of Degas is yet another reminder of the author’s limitations. He is vulnerable, mortal and not creative enough to gain immortality by producing a masterpiece: "It is sad to be naked and to lack talent."

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A physician recounts an experience he had assisting an American plastic surgeon as he performed charity surgery in Honduras. One young woman, Imelda, dies of malignant hyperthermia prior to surgical repair of her cleft lip. After her death, the surgeon returns to the patient to finish the surgery. The narrator tries to imagine the surgeon's motivation for this act, as well as the family's reaction to it.

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The narrator, Frank, an aging man with cataracts, heart murmur, and diabetes, reflects on the life he now lives with Francine, his wife. They have been together 46 years and time, he muses, "has made torments of our small differences and tolerance of our passions." They know little of one another’s daily lives; he doesn’t even know what conditions her array of pills on the breakfast table are meant to treat. Frank has taken to reading poetry.

Francine claims she has been hearing an intruder outside the window at night. She finds poems on the window sill. She is mystified and a little frightened. At her request Frank stays up all night one night to watch for the romantic intruder. Midway through that night he takes her for a walk in the frozen street. When they return to bed, aching from their respective debilities, he turns to her for the first time in recent memory, holds her, and kisses her as he used to, clinging to her fingers, "bone and tendon, fragile things," knowing he will die soon, and that life can still surprise him.

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