WEBVTT

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"Intensive Care."

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"In the antiseptic
Eden, your small light

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burns: a green dot roaming
the fluorescent twilight

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like a comet the
halls of evening.

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A pulse that carried you
across two continents,

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from coal mining village,
cricket for the county,

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and Oxford ribbons,
to picturesque America

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where life is a bonfire
and a man's heart

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does not attack him.

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For 14 years, I've huddled
close to that heart.

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Strangers decode by echo
scan and oscilloscope.

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The smocked magicians of
rhythm turn level eyes

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to your pounding electricity.

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Midnight.

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All our totemic
animals are asleep,

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the full bestiary
of our animal love.

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The doctors, your mother,
and your poet all sleep.

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Only your heart lies awake.

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With ink and a stylus,
it scratches out a story,

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speaking its dialect,
all quiver and pump.

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You may sleep.

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But the novelist
in your chest never

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sleeps, minting yarns,
bold, stylish, and macabre.

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When it gavels, alarms
ring up and down the ward.

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Are you all right, a
nurse wakes you to ask.

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And you know your heart has been
rambling again while you slept.

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Slipping off the hoods
of all its falcons,

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turning loose the warbling
cockatoos of the unconscious.

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At home alone, across the
lake, a darkness too possible

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invades the house, and
my chest becomes a suit

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of armor shrunk tight by worry.

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Mi casa is su casa.

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In lines only a few heartbeats
long, a gentle palpitation.

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I want to fly to that ward,
black as a mineshaft, where

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you drowse, thatch deep
in wire and electrode,

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still gamely performing a
ventriloquism from the heart.

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On a monitor, your small
light glowing like radium."

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