For Eleanor, a confabulation of stories
April 23, 2018 by merimee
She really did look pretty with the angora shawl
arranged around her turquoise top
It brought out the blue in her eyes that must’ve made many a man swoon
and so she tucked her hair into the beaded butterfly cap
grabbed her book of poems and wheeled down to the nurses’ station.
Anything, anyone to distract her from the sleepless night
the whole day in the awkward plasti-coated bed causing
her to dread the many hours of another starless, endless, frightening night .
But “Yes,” he said, “Of course you may hang out with me here,”
and she mentioned her poems, the book open on her knees;
he was the best one at lifting her, with her good leg now healing, and
so she lifted him with her gift of words, patient, vivid memories of her past.
A gentle giant, she called him, a man with hands twice the size of hers;
she’d gushed like a girl in love telling of the kindness she’d found.
Rehabilitation facilities are famously full of incompetent youth,
attempting to care for the suffering elderly, but just not getting it.
And yet, the night nurse, neither young nor elderly, Lamont we’ll call him,
was a knight of magical powers who seemed he could, if only he had his
valiant steed at work with him, he would have swooped her up
across his horse’s back and galloped her into the desert for
star-gazing delights.
Just out of reach, just out the door, and
so, she read him her poems as he sat and listened entranced,
at 2 AM, just the two of them, but first, and after, he held her hand.
The pain and fear left as he magnetically took it from her;
from her fingers and palms he let the anguish pass into him where
he tossed it like lightning out into the ethers, his mighty arms
giving a great fling, and what she carried had diminished as her gratitude increased.
There are many ways to love;
Lamont the night nurse was Eleanor’s gift of the illness, the gift of love.