Letter from the Blue Ridge, and: Villanelle for My Two Spines

Letter from the Blue Ridge

Virginia Center for the Creative Arts

In this place of earnest minds and work,
there's a room where we signed our names on the wall,
drew monograms entwining our initials.
Seven years ago, before I got sick.

It's warm for October. Gnats swarm my lunch-
box and bees drift by on streams of scent.
The dairy cows have gone for good.
In their place, grazing steers roll up
their lips like loose silk cuffs to chomp
the osage oranges, those warty melons the Indians
called fruit without beginning or end.

We called our meetings trysts; sometimes we called
my studio "Hotel California," or "the lab,"
referring to the plants I collected in jars - poke-
berry, honeysuckle, sumac with its carmine
velvet spears. And on the sill, osage
oranges, their milky sap dissolving the paint.
We never spoke of love, also a fruit

without beginning or end. My breath caught
the last morning when you pointed to the foggy horizon
as we woke, saying, Look! The mountains
here appear and vanish at will.

I've peeked into the studio we graffitied:
no evidence of our stay, of the mattress thrown
to the floor, or the wax drips from votives rimming
our lair to ward off mice. No inkling, either,
of what lay ahead - spinal collapse, two years
in bed, body braces, and the terrible self-
ishness of pain - all of which we entered

blamelessly as a couple of lovers walking
into the woods. Or into a room with a view
of mountains in the distance - blue at dusk,
pink at dawn, with firebreaks like healed
incisions. Now I think that what you meant
was not that love can't last if mountains don't,
but that mountains can be moved.

And move. Though today they're simply sunning
themselves, lying sprawled chine to hip,
content. I wanted to write and tell you this,
and that I'm well, I'm well.

Villanelle for My Two Spines

O chain of bones, you venomous snake
articulating like a rusty hinge,
I arched with pleasure before you ached

like a rotten tooth, a lip snagged on a fishhook.
I saw the surgeons' implements arranged
before I slept in my chain of bones. They cut the snake

at the lumbar curve. Scalpels trailed a wake
of scars; inside, the nerves inflamed. I binged
on pills that gave no pleasure, failed to quell the ache.

The last resort: doctors implanted titanium disks,
steel rods and screws, building a cage
around the chain of bones. Now the venomous snake

lives within this scaffold, its bionic
twin. Held as still as fluid in a syringe,
it gives a zero-sum pleasure: the slackening

of pain. Will the old spine slip its bars and attack?
Or will the new one with its duller twinges
reign? O chain of bones, you venomous snake
I'll settle for this pleasure: a back with a bearable ache.