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.