The doctor said quite soothingly that I ought to quit. I pointed to the brown spit-diluted stains of blood on my sateen pillow and the doctor quit his mockings. Now you are a doctor’s dream, he said, it is time not to dream. Put your foot on something cold. What will become of me without a boat between these fingers, the poison on my tongue, the leaf curled in the red box? I turn my head. There is only the synthesis of sleep to remind me of bells in the grass, smooth underwater flying, the brilliant colors. A cool gassy perfume hangs in the throats of the flowers, at the table where I sit and wait for my glass to be refilled. When I face them my face grows pale. The world is a treacherous mirror. In it I seem, for a moment, still young, but the pain of sickness is not companionable, and one is alone at the sink, unfolding scrap sheets, scrubbing teeth, reviewing the facts of the day.

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Theodore Worozbyt has received grants from the NEA, and the Georgia and Alabama Councils for the Arts. His poetry appears recently or is forthcoming in 42opus, Alice Blue, American Poetry Journal, Crazyhorse, Faultline, Hotel Amerika, Image, Kulture Vulture, Mississippi Review Online, New England Review, National Poetry Review, North American Review, Passages North, The Southern Review, turnrow and Verse Daily. A Unified Theory of Light, a chapbook, has just been released by Dream Horse Press; The Dauber Wings, a full length collection, is forthcoming from The American Poetry Journal.
E-mail: worozbyt at gmail dot com
 

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