Granted

You took it for granted because
it was. All of it. Every single
swallow required the work of more
than thirty muscles you didn’t know you had,
much less that they have names,
names you’re absorbing as you learn how
to swallow all over again. And to speak—
almost a hundred muscles involved in the act of speaking,
says the speech therapist, who visits your room daily
in your recovery. And who knew?—
every little thing the body did,
every minute of your life, a friggin’
miracle of engineering. Every breath, swallow,
syllable. And now you’re beating yourself up
for taking it all for granted. But what’s given
is given. It remains given even if
you lose it. Even if you never get it back.
And if you do get it back—praise
the doctors and nurses, praise the therapists, praise
the unspeaking cashier in the hospital garage
half-smiling a little sadly on your way out—
for God’s sake, take it for granted
now that you know that it is.

In-Patient

I had this romantic notion
about being sick—I thought
I’d get a lot of reading done,
and it would be a much-needed break.
I could look out the window
from my hospital bed and think
about all the important things—
or all the unimportant things—
while waiting for my lunch to come.
I could call the nurse with my call button
and fall in love with her or one
of her fine colleagues.
++++++++++++But now
I feel too ugly in my illness
to even think about flirting
with beauty. And I don’t feel like reading
now that I’m feeling so wretched
that all I want to do is sleep. And looking
out the window now, I see myself
walking out of the room, walking
out of the hospital—out the main doors
and down the street, to the next street,
and the next street and the next, until
I get to the woods. Then I see myself
lying down there among the trees like a fallen
tree, looking up at the living.

As It Happens

When they told me I was dying, which I wasn’t,
I began to miss the things in the world which I didn’t
even like about the world—the hideous traffic
on 95, for instance, which I found myself sitting in,
going nowhere on my way home, in no hurry now
that I was dying. I will miss this traffic, I thought,
feeling surrounded—girded—by people and life and
desire in the lanes. And the truck, the 18-wheeler
shouldering in, trying to pass on the right (I always
hated trucks), struck me now as a vessel of human
kindness, people helping people they don’t even know
by bringing them food from far away. I will miss
all the trucks, I thought, as I rolled down my window
and waved him in, and gave him the “I love you” sign.
I will miss the waiting, the fuming, the inching
along, the reductive bumper stickers and caviling,
crazy drivers with their chutzpah and their daring.
And the road itself, which is every road, everywhere,
bending, unfolding, continuing on. Then I turned
the radio on and the talking heads were talking
about death—all of the deaths at home and abroad.
And I thought to myself, the living are talking about
dying but the dying are talking about living. I am talking
about all the living I missed already, all the living
I wanted to do—any kind of living at all—now that I was
dying, which I wasn’t, as it happens, as it turned out.

Paul Hostovsky makes his living as a sign language interpreter in Boston-area hospitals. His newest book of poems, DEAF & BLIND, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag. His poems have won a Pushcart Prize and two Best of the Net awards. Website: paulhostovsky.com.