We are children here, hesitant
to speak or touch, afraid of reprimand.
The nurses, doctors are adult; they tell us
to wash our hands, to be careful; they
say that everything will be all right;
they remind us when it’s time for bed, where
dreams fill with stopped monitors and alarms,
intravenous tubing, and disembodied cries like clues
dropping amid the tears and gauze
through which your eyes, Susan, stare
blindly, your dry mouth working soundlessly.
Susan, if I could, I would hurt instead
with a clean, hard, physical pain, would take
this needle into my larger, drying vein
and have my stomach aspirated, which finds,
like yours, nothing but itself to work upon.
I would breathe through your congested lungs,
escaping this nauseous sickness of heart
that draws me back to stroke your red and jaundiced head
so new it shows the shape of birth, the stain
and strain of passage, to lift and hold your tiny hand
that does not feel or know me, though you hold
my life unstably as your own, as I would
hold yours, though tightly, tightly,
though not so tight you’d bruise or break.