A UCLA boy, crisp in cotton shirts,you came at me clean,
knocking me over. Even your painwas pure back then, your sweat sweet.
You ripped your heart open to love me,left it like that, forgetting
to pull the doorshut against the black rain.
When your blood first ran thick,you launched a campaign of good fat
and good news until cholesterolicallyyou resembled a child, but you drank
daily of the earth’s sadness,letting the dark paste
again come trickling in, redrawing your face with chalk.Oh the alluvium the doctors
found in you, their wires plumbedyour heart’s depths, two interventionalists
peered in at the pile-up of pain—the widow-maker fully occluded—
and wound their way around the sludge,depositing a stent, re-making me your wife.
A team of eight angels lifted youlike a stone sculpture of a man and moved
you to your bed, wrappingyou in white cotton, and you lay stock still
blinking up like a newborn at the future asblood came ruddying your cheeks.
***
Photo by Silvestri Matteo on Unsplash