This Too Is a Love Story

She lifts the spoon to the lips
she has kissed for forty years,
wipes the soup from his white beard,
steadies him as he rises from the chair.

Ours too is a love story, she says,
especially now, so many years
after they said I do, lived each vow,
and now reside permanently
in sickness, not in health.

Ours too is a love story,
she reminds him
as she rereads his favorite poem,
retells stories of their shared past,
retrieves him from hallucinations.

Ours too is a love story, she says,
of the love that endures
even in moments when her face
is the face of a stranger.

Ours too is a love story, she says,
as she sits at the kitchen table
sips tea that has grown cold in the cup,
listens for his voice down the hall,
studies the nursing home brochure.

*

Deliverance

As I walk the long hallway to her room,
I hear the carts delivering meals,
the nurses delivering meds,
the televisions delivering news.

I find her sitting in the wheelchair that has replaced the car
she once used to deliver groceries to a homebound neighbor,
To deliver her grandson to Little League practice,
To deliver herself to the church where she prayed for eighty years.

I sit beside her in the stuffy room
Delivering a small bouquet of supermarket carnations,
Delivering a hand to hold while we watch a Hallmark movie,
Delivering the only thing she wants from me—
a loving presence that says you are not alone.

*

Future Tense

Some days, the future is too hard to imagine.
Today, standing at the sink rinsing the breakfast dishes,
my future tense stretches only as far as tonight’s dinner.

Perhaps tomorrow I will feel strong enough
to knit the edges of today into a promise for the future.
Perhaps then the gloomy shadows of dying light will break.

Perhaps I will recall some persistent but forgotten hope.
Perhaps I will make chicken instead of shrimp.
And perhaps something sweet for dessert.

*

First Reader
       for Jim

Is it the smell of coffee
wafting down the hall
that stirs you from your sleep?
Or is it the way my step quickens
as I carry the steaming mug to you
like a sacred offering on those mornings
when I wake you with a sheet of paper
still warm from the printer,
and thrust it into your hands
before your eyes are fully open?

Or do you already know what’s coming
when you roll over before dawn
and find my side of the bed empty—
A sure sign that I am up and working
on some poem that has poked my ribs
in the night and simply will not let me fall
back to sleep until I let it stretch its limbs
across the page.

Never perturbed by the abrupt awakening,
but never inclined to simply skim the lines
and say it’s perfect just the way it is—
even when those are the words I want to hear.
That is why you are my first reader,
the one who sees me
in all my unpunctuated imperfection
and still believes in the promise
of the poem taking shape.

*

Confessions of a Freshman Comp Teacher

There comes a time when every
red-pencil wielding grammarian
must wonder if she might
have single-handedly derailed
The American Literary Canon.

“Emily, what’s with these dashes?
Comma or period, please.
If you want to get fancy,
you can throw in a semi-colon
now and then.”

“Walt, these run-on sentences
have to go. Yes, I know
you contain multitudes,
But must they all be
in the same sentence?”

“And you, Allen, have you ever
met a comma you didn’t like?
Honestly, this essay
just makes me want to howl!”

*

Gloria Heffernan’s most recent poetry collection is Fused (Shanti Arts Publishing). Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. She received the 2022 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List (New York Quarterly Books). To learn more, visit: gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.