Geffrey Davis

— for L   After the last surgery. After
hearing you wake within the breached levee   of your whole life. After water-hymn,
as I washed your body’s sutured beauty,   the stone doubt in both our faces whetted
by cancer.

Despite losing the dining table to it
for weeks, our family stays
with the puzzle, teetering plates
upon knees before the television
and then returning to the soft symphony
of shifting the oneness of a cardboard shape
into the satisfied oneness of another,
over and over, the thousand little clicks
of pleasure:—More than that
if you count how, from time to time,
someone will recognize the need
to undo what we took for perfection
but what, in fact, was silently stalling
the possibility of se