This Spring

I am sitting cross-legged on my couch, watching my breathing
intently like a miracle or a disaster in the making,
paying attention to each slide of smooth muscle along
the rib cage, each opening in my side like

a pocket of an accordion, each sternum and belly lift.
Reading Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to
Orpheus, because that fucker knew fearful beauty,
knew end of the world intensity, each gloomy word

chosen with cellular precision like he was just
transcribing what the angel of death said to him,
like he knew he’d die tomorrow, his sick lungs,

sick blood, murmuring in his ear. The book
is crumbling in my lap, pages dryly unzipping
from the spine, the glue small pink flakes on my legs.

The truth is I don’t know how to be a mystic
or eschatologist at this time. Or at any other.
I know how to do, I mean small things like brewing
elderflower tea or making chocolate pudding

or washing a bowl and spoon or dancing
in the kitchen after midnight till my core overheats
but my immune function finally kicks on
like a fussy furnace. Those things that move life along,

instead of heroically saving it. That’s overrated.
We rarely get to be heroes, the available roles are so few.
And poetically delving into mortality doesn’t

get us to that living part where the Underworld
opens its gates and gives back the beloved(s)
and unrolls a silky carpet into the future,

where we choose to live and choose how
we’ll get there. If we’re all dying, Rilke can’t make
it better. There is still time though. Time to
be vigilant, to say I love you, to put on my mask

every time I step out my door, time to always
navigate 2 metres away, time to check in, time
to say to the spousefriend I’m worried please
call the doctor, time to check in again tomorrow,

time to plan future movie nights and making
cashew cheese together and taking long walks and growing
courageous someday, time to say I love you again

even when it sounds ominous, like what I mean is
I’m afraid I will never see you again.
Don’t believe that each angel is terrifying.

Don’t believe in angels at all. Whether or not
they exist, they are immaterial to this project.
I believe in cup after cup of elderflower tea until
my temperature goes down, in my chosen

family’s expedition for the costly new asthma meds,
in stirring chocolate-almond pudding and dancing in sock
feet in my cabin-fevered kitchen and afterwards feeling
my lungs smoothly slide through my body, spreading

and furling, spreading then furling, my muscles opening
pockets for the air, entire rooms even, because
the new meds are working!, all this beauty,

my alveoli like flower cups, blooming amid
the disaster, amid the still being shakingly afraid
that someone, anyone, I love may never breathe again.