Poetry By Max Heinegg

Christian Collins CC




The Picture

-           Vermont with my mother, September 2025

She is dying in a field that will die 
and be reborn in a new season, 
not guise. Take my picture.

I am dying and that cannot be helped.

In a field of flowers by a hundred-year-old barn
now a natural hotel, 
rooms warm in the night. 

I do not feel old.

All the wood stands for now. 

Before sunset, 
one door remains.






No Memoir


At PD, they ask us to write the title 
of our last few years, 
so, I debate the prosaic, 
Highs and Lows, Generativity vs Stagnation,
Hibernation and Emergence.
My colleague mutters, The Inferno,
because he’s been down the spiral
but returned to tell us all. 

All summer, cancer was a steady hunter,
his mother, gone, 
and mine, fading.

Yet, here are their sons
lucky to have worthy labor 
and a calendar to fill 
with red-letter days to come.

On break, a journeyman tells me the good 
word of retirement legislation. 
We may walk in five years. Five years! 
That’s all we’ve got!

We return, but still no name 
for the days made dearer by the dying. 
An old song maybe? Life and How to Live it?
These days, love and how to shield it.

No matter, the presenter says, 
We’re off  to pressing matters. 
There isn’t time to share. 






Sickness, Preceding


On the table, the book Being Mortal,
the ginger lozenge,
the Pepto tablet, 
the offending tea
and the preferred seltzer.

Dumping my mother’s vomit
into the toilet
with the tattered, soft seat
I am clear about cancer
and what it will do.
 
I can now see the outlines, 
why she would want to die,
the image taking shape
the detail and color almost 
unnecessary to imagine.

The damage is doing, being 
done. The pen doesn’t have to 
try.

​



​Max Heinegg is the author of Good Harbor (2022), Going There (2023), and the chapbook Keepers of the House (2025), all on Lily Poetry Review Press. He is poet-laureate of the city of Medford, 2025-2027. 
He is also a songwriter and recording artist. His most recent record, Through Traveler, is a series of poems set to music, from Whitman to Roethke. On the web at www.maxheinegg.com



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