Revenant

This disease has come back

With frills and furbelows.

You must give your whole life to poetry

Only a few survive if that—

Poems I mean, paper crumpled

Shades of another water—

Far springs are what you long for,

Listening for the slow drip of chemicals

Through a hole in your chest.

If you were torn from me

To be well again, what might that mean?

The flowering plum sprung from late snow,

Ratcheting trill in the blackberry bush

Blood streaks, pluck and throb of mercy.