Late Repair by Ken Victor

POEM TITLE: Late Repair POET NAME: Ken Victor POEM: After hearing about your glioblastoma I find myself calling you tearing off thirty-years of silence we welcomed to heal bruisings we’d inflicted upon each other from too much love or not enough We never figured out which Your speech is slower than I remember and slurred You are deliberate and thoughtful choosing your words the way you would pick out an eggplant for a meal you’d improvise whipping up a one-of-a-kind-never-to-be-repeated dish Tell me about your kids you say And I tell you knowing you are childless knowing that in our previous life we had chosen the abortion he or she less now than a phantom haunting the memory of an absence And what has time done to us if not worn down our battlements and lowered the drawbridges made you ill and me old and each of us who had been warriors as much as lovers ready for this no more armour no more armour We clarify chronologies What I have forgotten you’ve retained What I have retained you’ve forgotten We did have our moments didn’t we? you ask Yes I answer yes we did and let’s be sure to talk again last words offered as a trail of breadcrumbs we each know leads nowhere END OF POEM. CREDITS AND BIO: Copyright © Ken Victor A recipient of a National Magazine Award for poetry, Ken Victor is the author of the collection We Were Like Everyone Else (Cormorant Books, 2019). He makes his home in the Gatineau Hills of Quebec.