There he lies in his hospital gown,
his bed whining as it raises his back,
His big chest heaves as if stacked
With years of smoking, inhaling dust
And asbestos before it was banned.
He is alight like an actor on the stage,
The focus of our love.

Outside the big window the rain clatters
Like a beaded curtain against the glass.
In the next bed a man’s old body lies still,
But his spirit is in a long-ago town in Jamaica.
He is young and decides to trade eternal sunshine
For ice and gloom so he can amount to something.

We speak in Italian and English,
And his love wonders if she will be a widow a second time,
But not without a stubborn drawn-out struggle,
Like Jacob with the angel, only the angel breaks his hip.
She is life itself and pours life across the room
Into his weakened body.
He smiles at her and says the doctors are quacks.

Not three months ago the view out their window
Was of a man pushing a cart of trinkets along the beach,
Everything is made by Indians he assures them.
Each night they take turns treating one another to dinner,
This circle of friends from the freezing north.

Everyone loves him because his heart is as large as
The Pacific rolling onto the shore,
And because he tells stories in the natural way of storytellers,
The listeners transported into another reality,
And forgetting the now.

But it is for more than that that they love him.
They love him for the same reason we love the sea
And the ships that sail upon it,

Or love children and the way they play,
Or love young women for their grace,
The grace we see in the flight of cranes,
Or love the spectacle of the world transformed by moonlight,
Or the moon itself gliding over us from the beginning,
Watching us being born, living our lives and disappearing,
Much like the waves rolling onto the beach
When the earth was very young.

May 16th, 2011