Don Welch

With spring in our flesh the cranes come back, funneling into a north cold and black. And we go out to them, go out into the town, welcoming them with shouts, asking them down. The winter flies away when the cranes cross. It falls into the north, homeward and lost. Let no one call it back when the cranes fly, silver birds, red-capped, down the long sky.

After an hour in the infusion lab, Taxol dripping into her, fighting her cancer; after sitting nauseous next to a man vomiting into a Pepsi cup, she rose, palming the wall, stooping only to pick up a pen a doctor had dropped, giving it back to the doctor who had slipped it poorly into his coat.

Hard to know which is more gnarled, the posts he hammers staples into or the blue hummocks which run across his hands like molehills. Work has reduced his wrists to bones, cut out of him the easy flesh and brought him down to this, the crowbar’s teeth caught just behind a barb. Again this morning the crowbar’s neck will make its blue slip into wood, there will be that moment when too much strength will cause the wire to break. But even at 70, he says, he has to have it right, and more than right. This morning, in the pewter light, he has the scars to prove it.

To be shy, to lower your eyes after making a greeting. to know wherever you go you’ll be called on, to fear whoever you’re near will ask you, to wear the softer sides of the air in rooms filled with angers, your ship always docked in transparent slips whose wharves are sheerer than membranes.