"Never mind. The self is the least of it. Let our scars fall in love." –Galway Kinnell
Here we are,
synchronized lovers,
our scars spookily entangled
three years apart.
No longer ourselves.
Everything is finally now,
Everything forever here.
A catastrophic aortic dissection
befalls you
as you wash your soft hands
in the bathroom.
My head spins,
my tongue twists
with a cerebral infarct
in the kitchen.
We speed through
the Amsterdam Avenue space-time tunnel
to the St. Luke's ER.
I'm in the ambulance with you,
and three years later
Ana takes me to the same ER in an Uber.
Everything in the present tense.
You save lives there
working as a nurse in the 1980s.
You die in the crash room in 2021,
I massage your feet,
I whisper farewell in your ear.
Doors' down,
I am diagnosed with a double stroke
and survive.
I keep seeing you in the ER.
I bring Danny and sandwiches during your break.
You are pronounced dead at 9 p.m.
I take your clothes home in a plastic bag,
weeping in a taxi with Ana.
Proximities:
Aorta explodes in your chest,
from root to iliac,
Language gets lost and found
in my left temporal lobe.
Kitchen and bathroom,
Close enough.
I see you dead and alive every day.
We live into our 70s,
beating the odds,
without a clue when Death is coming.
On the brightest and most hopeful of days
you collapse and depart
without warning.
I suddenly lose my senses,
I recover in an hour,
a stroke of luck.
Invisible wounds:
you survive cancer, escape COVID,
George Floyd can't breathe in your chest.
Trump occupies my head,
a brain worm I can't extract.
I'm looking for you on the barricades.
You are light years' away
inside me.
We live and die
and recycle,
our scars falling in love.
