When You’ve Been Sick for a Time
The surgeon threaded the catheter
through my superior vena cava, let it dangle
just above my heart.
The young assistant scrubbed
until I felt like pudding--
Strange not to feel
pain, only meaty burrowing.
Sometimes the catheter rubs
and my heart hiccups.
When you’ve been sick for a time
you give up all your secrets, you give up
lies.
I liked building puzzles
as a child, the constancy
of the card table set up in the den.
I almost stayed at the Denio bar,
paid rent for a trashy trailer out back
because cowboys still hitched
their horses to the rail.
It doesn’t take long to turn a creek
into a crik.I think about going back.
I take my catheter to the grocery store
and to the county dump
where a man named Dirty Dale guides me
through TV dinners and bags of dirty diapers
to listen to Maria Callas sing
on a transistor radio. Ascolta, ascolta.
Listen, listen.
The little things gather
that I have left scattered about.
The surgeon threaded the catheter
through my superior vena cava, let it dangle
just above my heart.
The young assistant scrubbed
until I felt like pudding--
Strange not to feel
pain, only meaty burrowing.
Sometimes the catheter rubs
and my heart hiccups.
When you’ve been sick for a time
you give up all your secrets, you give up
lies.
I liked building puzzles
as a child, the constancy
of the card table set up in the den.
I almost stayed at the Denio bar,
paid rent for a trashy trailer out back
because cowboys still hitched
their horses to the rail.
It doesn’t take long to turn a creek
into a crik.I think about going back.
I take my catheter to the grocery store
and to the county dump
where a man named Dirty Dale guides me
through TV dinners and bags of dirty diapers
to listen to Maria Callas sing
on a transistor radio. Ascolta, ascolta.
Listen, listen.
The little things gather
that I have left scattered about.