The doctor tells you something is wrong.
The platelets in your blood, the doctor says.
Come back, more tests, a specialist, he says.
At the library, I review the possibilities
and in a minute, or a lifetime, I have watched
you die. I arrange a service
where I tell the ghost
of you how much we loved you but forgot to say.
I remind you how well you did though young
and insecure -- always better than you believed.
Your legacy, I told you, is glorious,
those two children, small but strong,
puzzled because you are not sitting
in the church beside them.
I am terrified I will make this so by thinking it,
am ready to fall over a cliff I built
from no material but fear. I know, finally,
I will drop into the trench where the atheist
finds God and pray, barter, beg.
Elizabeth Notter, essential love (Poetworks/Grayson Books, 2000)
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