Self Portrait in Red and White

 

I was just out of the hospital. It was snowing,

and my spirit was leading my body around

like an old dog

on a long leash.

Nurses are funny creatures, kissing the glass

of the locked cabinet as if it held a month in the country

where fountains flow patients

to the bathroom by themselves.

As a child, I lay in the snow sideways to the sky

and believed I would always have a place to go,

full of tomato soup 

and rag rugs for the floors.

That day, though, I was just out of the hospital

and been beaten up besides, for the fun of it

by someone younger

with healthy fists.

Bent like a damaged tree with red leaves,

I fell into a cab and got the stink eye from

a driver concerned 

about his upholstery.

At the hotel, in my sixth floor room, I kissed

the mirror above the sink. It was cold and smooth

with always that little

gap denying contact. 

With my prescription lost, real pain embraced me,

saying, write about the red of the blood and the white

of the weather,

the gray of cement and concussion.

I wrote the red of a fire welcomed by wood, a white bird

on a black branch outside the window from a warm bed

and a day that ended

years ago where I mended, more or less,

I still have that poem, a good one, full of the best of me,

a beautiful thing

still whole and fine

and standing on its own

when all the rest has gone.

_______

for Desperate Beauty at Desperate Poets.