Healing

I wanted my child satisfied with sunlight

projecting patterns of water through old glass,

with woodgrains telling their stories

of growing. But children's faces

are soft; we print them with more

than we mean. The tissues wanted

to keep her, remembering the comfortable

union; they didn't know

that was wrong. She comes back, though

the doorframe is loose, struck and struck

by the door when she cut a space

to breathe in. Last night we worked alongside:

she slicing onions into translucent rings,

I stirring separate fruits smooth.

May it not be too late for us-the birds

didn't have to learn what was printed in the cells

from the beginning: how to leave room for each

turn of wingspan in a long migration,

how to read the currents' roads, and take them.

HEALING

If the tests come out wrong, if the cells

begin to fail at their weaving;

if the body that so lightly carries

this life betrays me-some night

when the pines talk to one another,

when no moon would tell my secret, snow

fill my steps, I could go to that hill

so far beyond my neighbor's it has no name.

Walking and waiting for numbness, I'd feel

the blade of air I'd chosen for my chest.

And if winter were too far, the water

I watched today could take me-swift

churn of Otter Creek Falls, fanning out

smooth, moving from shore. Entering

such depth, a body would be part

The doctor sensed the first tear

in his own tissues. The hand

with scythe-neat nails began to belong

to someone rebellious, the feet

were marble boats headed different ways;

the tongue turned against the thoughts

that tried to guide it. His country lost

its history-the childhood house

with its swings and boxwood borders,

the woman he noticed as she turned away.

He dreams of dusty arenas, every exit

barred, a roar coming from the bull chute.

Healer, he knew there'd be no reversal:

no way to cut or soothe. The ocean was open

all the way to the skyline: generous and deep.

How did he choose the time-after a day

of stumbling, or one so bright it tempted him

to stay? One night of no moon, he listened

to his wife breathing deep and even,

slipped back the broad cuff of sheet. Standing,

he let his night clothes fall like snakeskin,

rustling down. He stepped into the last future

he could make-cold salt marking his ankles,

his calves as he waded in. Thighs, balls,

belly, chest. The tide began to love him

then, its pulse pressing his nipples,

answering his heart. He kept on,

letting in the water that would be his new air,

opening to a larger world, the failed body

lost to the final healing.