"Intensive Care."
"In the antiseptic Eden, your small light
burns: a green dot roaming the fluorescent twilight
like a comet the halls of evening.
A pulse that carried you across two continents,
from coal mining village, cricket for the county,
and Oxford ribbons, to picturesque America
where life is a bonfire and a man's heart
does not attack him.
For 14 years, I've huddled close to that heart.
Strangers decode by echo scan and oscilloscope.
The smocked magicians of rhythm turn level eyes
to your pounding electricity.
Midnight.
All our totemic animals are asleep,
the full bestiary of our animal love.
The doctors, your mother, and your poet all sleep.
Only your heart lies awake.
With ink and a stylus, it scratches out a story,
speaking its dialect, all quiver and pump.
You may sleep.
But the novelist in your chest never
sleeps, minting yarns, bold, stylish, and macabre.
When it gavels, alarms ring up and down the ward.
Are you all right, a nurse wakes you to ask.
And you know your heart has been rambling again while you slept.
Slipping off the hoods of all its falcons,
turning loose the warbling cockatoos of the unconscious.
At home alone, across the lake, a darkness too possible
invades the house, and my chest becomes a suit
of armor shrunk tight by worry.
Mi casa is su casa.
In lines only a few heartbeats long, a gentle palpitation.
I want to fly to that ward, black as a mineshaft, where
you drowse, thatch deep in wire and electrode,
still gamely performing a ventriloquism from the heart.
On a monitor, your small light glowing like radium."