A warm Tuesday. Terry shows up bundled
in sweater, heavy jacket and wool hat.
His immune system is fucked by the drug
they gave him at the hospital for his fibrillating heart,
he tells me as we start walking.
We haven’t gone walkabout for a month
because on Christmas Day, o sing noël,
Terry felt what he describes as an oncoming
three-cubic-yard fart that never arrived.
Instead came a fever, weird heartbeats, a hospital.
A surgeon who looked like a teenage girl
made three holes in Terry’s belly,
mucked around and pulled out a ruptured appendix.
She patched a few leaks, pipe and valve repair,
then backfilled the ditch and covered it with asphalt.
No, wait, that comes later.
She sewed the incisions with thread.
Unlike our usual mountain path, Terry and I
are walking the domestic streets of town because
teen-girl-surgeon has forbidden him to lift anything
over twenty pounds or, most vexing, to ride the Kawasaki.
Without dirt-biking, he wrote a whole shitpile of poetry.
Several were immediately accepted by journals nobody reads.
For a poet, that’s fame!
We pause in our journey so Terry can remove his
overcoat, sweater, hat, long johns and undershirt
because he is smelly with sweat. All the anesthesia
stored itself in his fat cells, as anesthesia does,
and now it’s eking out in voluminous perspiration,
so Terry has stripped himself as townsfolk wave
from their passing cars and Terry in his undershorts
waves back because everybody knows Terry,
and Terry knows every free-flowing pipe
that wanders under the roads and into their houses.
He remembers blockages, geysers, disasters of mud
with Terry at the center manning a backhoe and a jackhammer
and a thirty-six inch Rigid pipe wrench, bright red.
Pants and boots back on, moving along,
Terry notes water in a gully
and suspects a leaking six-inch main,
but further inspection finds the whole hillside seeping,
simply seeping as hillsides do after rain.
Everywhere Terry sees jobs he’s done — ditches dug,
pipes repaired, valves replaced, memories of muck
tied up with surgical thread. No, wait, I mean
happy memories, if you can understand,
for Terry is a fix-it guy who takes satisfaction
in getting things done. Done well.
A walk with a friend exercises the heart, the lungs,
heals the soul. At the end Terry, a hugger, tells me
not today because he can’t risk infection.
So he puts on his sweater, his heavy coat,
his woolen hat and we part, unhugged
but repaired somehow, no blockage
nor geyser nor disaster. Flowing freely.
