It's Been One Year by David Curzon
DIANE, IT’S BEEN ONE YEAR
By David Curzon
1.
I went to China six weeks before you died.
Your voice was clear and adamant on the phone:
“Don’t worry and don’t cut the visit short.
We’ll meet at the treatment after you return.”
You liked a restaurant on the Cancer Center’s block.
I got there early, watched the door. It was
a shock. You hobbled with a walking-stick.
The cancer had crippled you while I was gone.
Your nature now contained this fitfulness.
I was glad to see you still had appetite.
And then we hesitantly walked along the street.
The radiation didn’t take much time.
In the elevator you held onto my arm.
You argued you could get home by yourself.
You’d catch the bus. We took the cab I hailed.
The driver waited patiently as you painfully eased in.
The seat was soft and you managed to sink back.
You were heading for your haven and relaxed.
The traffic slowed to a stop, but started up again.
It was a comforting enclosure for us both.
And then your end. A bed in a hospital.
You couldn’t move or speak. Your limbic hours.
I looked into your eyes. My last words were absurd:
“I wish that there was something I could say.”
The pupils of your eyes grew wider in response.
You were amused I couldn’t find a thought.
This riposte was your parting gift to me:
it gave a radiance as my ultimate sense of you.
And then the coma. Your being was wheeled out
and driven in an ambulance back home
to those enduring days of breathing heavily
as your vital constitution contended on
while watched and washed by family and friends.
2.
When you were alive you were alive to things
like the resilience of the grass in Central Park
where Fay and I went yesterday to walk
on the first anniversary of your death
with all the audience, and the actors too,
from scene to scene, in one of Shakespeare’s plays,
as you and I had done in summers of our past,
and this year, acting in a Midsummer Dream,
an Oberon conjured his sleeping Queen:
Be as thou wast wont to be;
See as thou wast wont to see.
Dian’s bud o’er Cupid’s flower
Hath such force and blessèd power.