Two months later I fell in love for the first time in my life.
Here's a poem about crushing my spine.
I fell from a tree a little more than 100 foot,
head down, like a rocket, just shearing off branches.
I'd never been hurt.
I'd never been in a hospital and I'd fallen out of many trees.
I grew up with an orchard in the backyard.
You fall and you put out your hand and you spin around.
You do something clever and you break your fall and you thump
into the Earth.
This was head down.
I was going faster and faster just vwump.
And they took me to the hospital and expected me to die
and when I didn't die, I said it right away,
I said, if I'm going to die in a few days I
want to go home and die.
It's Christmas and I want to die under the Christmas tree.
Because Christmas was very important for Linda and me.
She always put the mattress on the floor
so you wake up looking up into the Christmas tree
Christmas morning.
That's what you first see.
So I made them build me a skeleton.
Everything was smashed, not just my spine.
I couldn't support my own body.
So I had them build me something out
of aluminum tubing and canvas and sheepskin, oddly enough.
Then I was able to go home to die and then I didn't die.
Well eventually because they keep giving you X-rays
and this happens and that happens,
but I had to live in the skeleton for about a year.
Finally, I said, well, if I'm not
going to die I'm going to go to Europe.
So I went for my last checkup and they said, well,
you're fine.
It's a miracle, but you're fine.
As I left, I wished them goodbye and they wished me bon voyage
and I got to the door and one doctor said one thing.
He said, if you notice a kind of itching in your fingers,
a little burning sensation in your fingers,
you'll know that the paralysis has begun.
Can you imagine traveling in places
where they have mosquitoes?
When you wake up in the night, and you're
asleep you're so drugged with sleep you don't process
any thoughts at all, and you find
yourself scratching your hands?
Scary.
It's called All the Way from There to Here.
This is after the marriage was over with Linda.
I'm sitting in San Francisco up on the Potrero Hill.
From my hill I look down on the freeway and over to a gull,
lifting black against the gray ridge.
It lifts slowly higher and enters the bright sky.
Surely our long steady dying brings us to a state of grace.
What else can I call this bafflement?
From here I deal with my irrelevance
to love with a bewildering tenderness of which I
am composed.
The sun goes down and comes up again.
The moon comes up and goes down.
I live with the morning air and the different airs of night.
I begin to grow old.
The ships put out and are lost, put out
and are lost, leaving me with their haunting awkwardness
and the imperfection of birds while all the time I've
worked to understand this happiness I have come into.
What I remember of my nine-story fall down through the great fir
is the rush of green and the softness of my regret
and the ambulance going to my nearby death,
looking out at the trees leaving me.
What I remember of my crushed spine
is seeing Linda faint again and again,
sliding down the white X-ray room
wall as my sweet body flailed on the steel table,
unable to manage the bulk of pain.
That and waiting in the years after for the burning
in my fingertips, which would announce, the doctor said,
the beginning of paralysis.
What I remember best of the four years
of watching in Greece and Denmark
and London and Greece is Linda making lunch.
Her blondness and ivory coming up out
of the blue Aegean, Linda walking with me daily
across the island from Monolithos to Fira and back.
That's what I remember most of death, the gentleness of us
in that bare Greek Eden, the beauty as the marriage steadily
failed.