A UCLA boy, crisp in cotton shirts,
you came at me clean,
knocking me over. Even your pain
was pure back then, your sweat sweet.
You ripped your heart open to love me,
left it like that, forgetting
to pull the door
shut against the black rain.
When your blood first ran thick,
you launched a campaign of good fat
and good news until cholesterolically
you 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 plumbed
your 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 you
like a stone sculpture of a man and moved
you to your bed, wrapping
you in white cotton, and you lay stock still
blinking up like a newborn at the future as
blood came ruddying your cheeks.
***
Photo by Silvestri Matteo on Unsplash
