Descending America

In Utah I watched a crow fly across a Utah
tourism billboard as though corroborating
the state’s claim on beauty by making it more
real. The black Camry I was driving alone through
the country seemed conversely to position every
place I went as less real, motels and gas stations
concocted to move my body eastward as, in an ICU
in Seoul, my grandmother’s changed status:
virus transporting itself into pneumonia, then
coma. Before she had been admitted into
her nursing home, I had been surprised how her
neurodegenerative disorder did not mean language
was lost, but generated creatively and ordered
differently. She had more to say than ever,
though fewer wanted to listen, and she was
more often fact-checked aloud. When a pandemic
paused visits and nurses limited patient time,
her sentences shortened and scattered, sacrificed
to lengthen her physical life. The next morning,
in Colorado, the call came that she was dead,
three years of surrender to a public disease now
complete in its brutality. It was the third day
of a new year and I was still two thousand
miles from rural New Hampshire, where I was
going, and only ten thousand kilometers from her
white-flowered wide altar with her stone-carved
name and the portrait she had sat for and
chosen for this occasion, where I was not.