Long Distance

It was a talky day,
all full of your kids’
move to Texas—
funny, them
all becoming nurses
now our own nurse
is gone.
Since Kay died …

Reaching out over –

I was gonna say wires,
but phones have none
these days –

touching the sister
we can, one at a time.

So good of you to be here
so long, staying months
through the decline and falls
of the fun one, the one
with four grown kids
and decades of hospital
hall miles on her
feet, a healing touch
right there except
when her body
mutinied and we
could only take turns
testing for our own
catastrophe.

You’re clean for now,
under intense observation
like all of us, so far
only two lost our beans –
kidney beans, a joke –
get it? What’s eating me?
No more of the same

I hope. Running out
of spare parts,
hoping the recipe for this
mess got lost in the months
since we took
our turn on the table –

not you, but me
and the other one. Two hit,
two missed. So we talk

and do the waiting over
and over again,

thanks to modern technology –
anything’s possible.