I wonder at your quiet thorough calm:
the night before your lung operation,
a fortune cookie blank inside your palm,
you still imagined messages that made
a world whole and completely possible,
constructed mostly from that empty slip.

YOU WILL GO ON A JOURNEY LONG AND FULL
YOUR LIFE’S GEOGRAPHY SHOWS FREQUENT TRICKS
YOU WILL SIT UP ONE NIGHT WITH A LUNATIC
ex-girlfriend, in her catatonic grip,
while I wait at home, as volatile,

in the only lighted room in the neighborhood
and read the “Night Life” listings, pages curled
around cartoons, or travel ads I could
phone to send me loose across the world.
Toll-free numbers of hotels compared,
I make a reservation everywhere

and wonder how to measure what I’d learn
in such a travelling out. But I return
to my inmost fear of losing you to you,
of, in my terror, letting go too soon.

While you, so self-sufficient, sure and glib,
have never touched exactly where you breathe.
It took a doctor to first crack the ribs
apart, remove the lung unsheathed;
for once you couldn’t manage your disease.
When someone finally reached that private sphere,
you say, “It hurt like hell for years.”