Teratoma, 2014

The specificity: to walk, to walk again,
to stair the house, to leave the couch. Not possible
to kneel, to stab
the ground
or bend. As if each inch
no longer needs a door,
you give the limb. A part that moved. A gift
—or was it
a betrayal? You give the hardest
loneliness. Insist to give it
to understand this world.
Out the back door, hedges.
All light on boundaries.
Again you wake tilted. With what’s left to you.
What is not. And you think only how it is
not to think
a leg. How we can walk
with our minds. You’re sure you can
do this. Be not ruled
by your elemental framework: bone and cartilage.
Remember the first day in winter, wavering
weather, femur, the fourth debridement.
The bees are audible at your neighbor’s garden, the next trailer.
Hungry, they are drinking.
You focus on the geography
of waiting. You wait. You are drifting—
patella, tibia, fibula, remember tarsals.
The future is a remedy
that can also be an emptiness.
Outside now, birds
greet each other, twittering birds
run away each time you look.