When You’ve Been Sick for a Time                                               
 
The surgeon threaded the catheter
through my superior vena cava, let it dangle 
just above my heart.
 
The young assistant scrubbed 
until I felt like pudding--
Strange not to feel 
 
pain, only meaty burrowing. 
Sometimes the catheter rubs 
and my heart hiccups.
 
When you’ve been sick for a time 
you give up all your secrets, you give up 
lies.
 
I liked building puzzles 
as a child, the constancy 
of the card table set up in the den.
 
I almost stayed at the Denio bar, 
paid rent for a trashy trailer out back 
because cowboys still hitched 
 
their horses to the rail.
It doesn’t take long to turn a creek 
into a crik.I think about going back. 
 
I take my catheter to the grocery store 
and to the county dump 
where a man named Dirty Dale guides me 
 
through TV dinners and bags of dirty diapers
to listen to Maria Callas sing 
on a transistor radio. Ascolta, ascolta. 
 
Listen, listen.
The little things gather
that I have left scattered about.