Necrotising Enterocolitis
--You think about a poem too much.
Like Spanish moss,
it starts killing the tree!
Brenda
Hillman
For a long
while yesterday I sat in the numb panic
of forgetting
and dunce-cap gawking, as if all that time
holding your
i.v. pricked hand didn’t matter, hadn’t happened
at all and here
we all are nearly ten years later safe
in the wonder
and routine that is your day to day—
I felt my jaw fall
slack and then begin, at the ball and joint,
to itch and go
taut, as I thought and walked back through
the now thick entwining
vines and my kudzu mind that has spent
the last decade
growing over the windows I’d kept so carefully
closed but trimmed
and clean—and turning back, they are almost
alive they
almost fight back being cut through and once
they are they
lie sprawled at the heel of my boot and cough
the way you
coughed, new at my tight breast, and then spit,
and see, the
spit is green and bubbly and shines in the sun
we’re sitting
in and then slopes down onto your sluggish flushed
cheek, rising
with your limping breath. And the
stillness in the room
is absolute, paused,
as if right there a choice was offered, those damn two roads,
and didn’t I feel
you go cold, didn’t I, (and don’t I still) sitting
the ninety
miles beside you to the NICU, the long stop the tests the waiting-
room glee only
a children’s hospital can muster while you, I’m sure
of it baby,
floated above yourself, above us all, and chose to come back
down.
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