So, yeah, I have a lot of poems and prose about the stroke experience and I like to keep conversations going, so I think I’ll post one from to time. This one, “Life As Therapy,” deals with the different nature of the experience for the victim and for the person who cares for him or her:
Life as Therapy
What you do naturally
is therapy for me—
Use spoon, put leg into pant,
clap, walk to mail, button shirt,
Scrub genitals, brush teeth,
Talk, type this. The path
to getting better is backwards
by design, down to the studs.
I have wondered what clocks meant,
let gravity win without anger,
run my hand under a faucet
that steamed before I felt it.
The smallest privacy has been
the great triumph—peeing alone.
I fear sitting on stools, other
people’s showers, questions about
how I am, a tough piece of chicken
launching off a restaurant plate,
the cat’s meandering path.
You defer to safety. I shrug off.
Your loving hand guides.
I want to go alone, be afraid
on uneven sidewalks in rain.
How will we heal without
having shared the battles?
I don’t know your terrors
alone while I slept; you can’t
feel that I can’t feel. We circle.
