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Adagio in One Time

From the smooth plastered wall behind her,
Albinoni’s adagio drummed faintly like a heartbeat.
‘Who are you’, when startled awake by the touch of his hand,
were the first words she spoke.

A stained and tattered children’s toy, a rabbit lay
in the folds of her blanket rising with each shallow breath
lifted by her stomach.  Her eyes strained to focus,

eye lids closed then rose three-quarters up;
pallid flesh of her cheeks tremored when she tried to speak;
her lips and tongue worked independently from
words she wanted to say; only her eyes flickered,
but the words never came.

‘It’s okay, sweetheart, it’s okay’ he heard his voice say
over and over and over. He held her left hand in his,
cool and motionless like a broken twig,
a branch from a barren tree caressed by morning dew.

He balmed her lips with a Vaseline stick and offered liquid through a straw.
She heard him say the red-headed hummingbird, 
hadn’t gone away for the winter yet.

Pleased, her green eyes opened wide, fluttered and closed
for a moment, then said ‘I’m tired’. ‘I’ll go and let you rest’, he said,
‘enjoy the morphine dripping through the needle in your wrist’.
He said that three, four, six more times and still found
something else to say, anything just to stay around.

He kissed her forehead and kissed her cheek, twisted and slowly kissed her lips.
She looked at him with frustration in her green eyes pierced by confusion; 
‘I love you, I don’t want to leave you’ he heard
what her speech couldn’t say.

‘It’ll be okay’, he said, ‘everything will be okay’. These were the last words
he had to say except, ‘I’ll see you later’.

……but he didn’t.

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