This afternoon, as you sit by me, all the white sheets shiver.
With my eyes closed, we are far outside this hospital,
on the Rehoboth Beach sand, under the salted water,
just your skin and my skin with their rivers of scars
trickling, teaching our fingertips where to go every night.
But the time now, the time before surgery, is short, too short
because hours here melt away, and you are led away
and I am rolled behind a student doctor wearing rose-pink shoes.
It'll all be okay, she says, and I have frozen, just taking in white
upon white in the hallway and, inside the room, the woman
who bends over the sterile instruments, examining them,
her back to me. You were there before and now I have forgotten
until another doctor says to think of something sweet
before covering my face with a blue-tinted mask, soft as your fingertips,
and I inhale, thinking of everything your hands know how to do.
