Dialysis Trials - 1981

I did not salute you.

I was girls and baseball and Star Wars

tracing "AC/DC" on brown-bag book covers

a lip-gnawing priority over lectures.

You faced shade from the start.

Draped in hospital smell like a sour shirt

painfully hasty in your jaundiced actions

as if each movement raced some expiration

— limbs losing recall of their native arcs.

I try to haunt the hunched egoist teen:

discern the scholar, not the shell

staggering awkward to the green slate

to scribe flats and sharps in brisk sloppy marks

scraping dust white on the cleff-snake staff.

Eyes knob-lost behind swollen hills of cheeks,

each smile had to lumber fleshily into place

and Still you labored

desperate for the flighty rows to focus

on your Truth — music meant everything.

You huffed your muse across lined vinyl

and prayed for our transfiguration

through flat scratched 1960s fidelity.

I had not a whisper of empathy while

bruised stick arms caressed the air

from the ill-fitting corduroy confines

of your gray suit-jacket,

coaxing notes to migrate

steep, steep upstream

from your wounded flesh to our dull heads.

I marvel at the courage

of your dialysis trials.

I sing you now,

decades tardy -

and Teacher,

I praise your grace.