Magical Thanking

They say the pain of kidney stones is worse than childbirth.

There went martyrdom. 

He'd had two stones already that would not pass

and again we were in the emergency room

in the small mountain town where he lay flat and groaning

on the gurney, its sheets less white than he, where they

checked his blood pressure as I looked on, helpless,

useless, the rat attached to the rat attached.

I had slammed the brakes along the way, to let him wretch

in a ditch, he who'd never piss in the national forest with

no person or sound for acres around; 

thus the ditch had its significance.

Then, suddenly, a flutter of arms, feet; urgent voices;

he'd gone totally slack, eyes rolled up in his head

and I screamed, he's dying! feeling the world spin

as though minuscule, a tiny top, sick with vertigo.

I ceased to hear, could only see,

and then he was back, having fainted from pain

the nurses annoyed at hystrionics.

I didn't remember that in death the pupils are fixed;

terror does not admit much knowledge.

Panic will now be eternity's penumbra;

I felt yet will never fully grasp, his mortality,

reassuring myself, ah, but love itself abides,

(that magical thinking one so direly needs) --

of course it must -- disembodied love,

      an angel, a phantom, a fetish --

          as enduring, as bold, as promising,

              as stunningly white as death itself.

Copyright Julianza Shavin 2008