Our Medical Marriage (Podcast)

Our Medical Marriage

-for Susanne

We kneeled on the bookstore floor

two students scanning the bodies

of new books, checking out

each other's Principles

of Internal Medicine.

Scores of textbooks later

we're a pair of pagers and missed dinners,

companions in sleep-deprived nights.

We suffered the long delay

before our only child while we ran

to slashed wrists and ODs,

sprinted from half-read journal

to school play to board meeting.

In conversation long as summer light

we talked patients and drugs,

recited the simple prayers of dying,

learned how we both took medicine

as a life-long lover.

One hushed June evening in mid-life

scented rose and thick with fire-flies,

the phone steals her.

I sit with my half-filled glass

For more on this poem, click here.