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Post-Op

Here is his tremble, 
his wife, his own feeble gait,
the eloquent patience 
of the hours by her bedside 
as though he were the piece of her 

gone. If only she'd asked sooner 
about winds and rains 
that did mean a storm, 
it might have spared surgery. 
He imagines that now 

in a dream as he dozes 
how acorns could rise 
from ground to branch...
while in her dream 
all is chalk, the cliff, faces, sky,

the long white parts of night, 
till the ache returns 
in the way it does, 
flies in closer swoops, 
its crow cawing intrusion 

through the dormant thicket
of a narcotized fog,
like the oxygen hissing
steams of real breath, 
that which enlivens,

turns blue blood red,
not those "healing breaths,"
not the Zen inhalations
of incensed rooms 
without siderails that seem so far 

away now, so irrelevant.
He knows he has 
many reasons to be angry 
and many reasons to be sad
though he cannot remember 
what they are.

But he can remember  
through six decades of archives, 
the first crawls of their love, 
the many broths and agars 
that have grown it.

He wishes that love to be 
like today's small suture knot,
deep in her pain, for it to be 
that necessary, irreversible, and unobtrusive...
as it dissolves into its host.

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