A UCLA boy, crisp in cotton shirts,
you came at me clean,

knocking me over.  Even your pain
was pure back then, your sweat sweet.

You ripped your heart open to love me,
left it like that, forgetting

to pull the door 
shut against the black rain.

When your blood first ran thick,
you launched a campaign of good fat

and good news until cholesterolically
you resembled a child, but you drank

daily of the earth’s sadness,
letting the dark paste

again come trickling in, redrawing your face with chalk.
Oh the alluvium the doctors

found in you, their wires plumbed
your heart’s depths, two interventionalists

peered in at the pile-up of pain—
the widow-maker fully occluded—

and wound their way around the sludge,
depositing a stent, re-making me your wife.

A team of eight angels lifted you
like a stone sculpture of a man and moved

you to your bed, wrapping
you in white cotton, and you lay stock still

blinking up like a newborn at the future as
blood came ruddying your cheeks.

***

Photo by Silvestri Matteo on Unsplash