This has been a week a travel, visiting family and childhood friends I haven’t seen since before the lockdown. Often the part of our catching up is about health, what one friend calls “the organ recital.” This poem, then, feels appropriate:
Waking After the Surgery
And just like that, I was whole again,
seam like a drawing of an eyelid closed,
gauze resting atop it like a bed
of snow laid quietly in the night
while I was somewhere or something
else, not quite dead but nearly, freer,
my self unlatched for a while as if it were
a dog I had simply released from its leash
or a balloon slipped loose from my grip
in a room with a low ceiling, my life
bouncing back within reach, my life
bounding toward me when called.