Incurable

He studies the dinner card, ticks off the boxes for Jell-O and fruit cups; anticipates a deliciousness that he will later swallow mechanically on a plastic spoon. He’s fascinated by his own breath; tasting it on the exhalation, savoring a coolness, as lungs struggle to filter the chemical soup of the ward. He imagines sipping an effervescent sky, pouring it through a revitalized body. Shivers, as fingertips recall tactile experiences. He turns on his side, curls up into himself. The skin of his curved spine delicately corrugated. A nurse checks his chart, adds a note. She does not record a swaddling pall covering his flesh within which his wife, dog, even a 1958 Plymouth coddles him in a chrome enclosure for memories. At night, he enters a potting shed A place evolved from sweet tobacco, string and dark red begonias. From a gun-metal tin, he takes a small Swiss Army knife, scrapes a yellow clay from under his fingernails. He waters psychic seeds with the milky drops of his dreaming eyes. By dawn plasmid tendrils will have sprouted, they will bind up all his loose ends, then he will drift like a gibbous moon over the rib-sprung hollow of his bed.