Visiting Suzanne

Written by John Grey

I can only get through this

by explaining how unlike everything is.

The sanitized white walls

are not the forest.

The nurses, doctors, do not startle enough

to be the beasts.

As for that machinery measuring your heart-rate,

the constant drip of fluid into your right arm...

these aren't the oaks, the fluttering willow limbs.

Yes, there's flowers

but not the ones so wild,

they spring up anywhere.

Roses sit so still in their bed-side cage,

can't be plucked, only verified.

“Remember when.

I start to say, but then it occurs to me,

I'm sitting in the middle of a memory,

stripped of detail,

bleached and pale.

You grip my arm, to give it

flesh and bone at least.