Hematology

while he lives here’s a list of images light in a filthy glass pigeon dead on the high spiked window clear plastic bag above him full of water if water could kill everything that lives in you & it can — i sit in a corner of the cancer ward fingering the app that shows me other faggots in this hospital chat with one i might meet in radiology but don’t       instead make the sick man laugh while he’s conscious compliment his gown his new brutal cheekbones that appeared with the chemo if only it were simple as a magnet sucking the bad metals out of him if only i could make a better list more magic      less language periphrastic & restorative if only i met that stranger in the basement & our pleasure rose through the hospital bliss poultice for the sorrow-skinned who sit half-conscious & half-machinery while the sick man lives all i can do is recount the vast pastoral of his illness when he is gone i’m counting on all the good flooding back his beard a collapsed country i’ll refuge inside his laugh a memory so liquid i’ll hear it when anyone opens a window to scare the birds