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                       It’s like getting misplaced
out of the country. You don’t discuss the language.
                       You forestall

to invite instructions. Folks say lumbar radiculopathy. Aspect
                       hypertrophy
Vast-based disc protrusion. Put out of your mind your vacation spot.

                       
                       The trick isn’t
to really feel self-pity. The best way I do it’s to mention my frame
                       isn’t my

frame anymore. It’s anyone else’s. The ache, subsequently,
                       is not
mine. I’m simply visiting this bed room the place anyone

                       I don’t know
lies in ache, looking forward to dawn. I bend over his frame
                       and ask

solicitously the place, when, and for the way lengthy it has
                       harm.
He tells me. We sigh in combination, companionably.

                       
                       First light comes
slowly. First, the sky whitens. Ghostly timber emerge
                       like the pictures

on photographic paper within the forestall bathtub
                       of a darkroom.
You might have an entire new day of ache forward of you.

                       
                       The sundown from ache’s
window is painted via an artist who dips the best, camel-hair
                       watercolor brushes

in cochineal, royal crimson, amber, tangerine, salmon, uncooked sienna,
                       burnt umber.
Sky flames. After which its coals cool. A rose glow suffuses

                       the horizon
just like the strains of a girl’s carmine lipstick on a light-gray
                       serviette. And now

the painter, grown uninterested in sundown, rinses the ones blazing brushes
                       in a transparent glass jar
fof water. All colour dissolves. The water turns to nightfall.

                       
                       Ache is needy.
What did I do these days? Talked to it as to a lover.
                       “How does

that really feel? Is it higher whilst you lie for your facet
                       and put a pillow
between your legs? Curl knees as much as your chest?”

                       
                       I inform my frame
that we can cross to dinner the next day with two outdated pals.
                       It’ll be

a Roman dinner. We’ll reenact Pompeii, put on togas,
                       recline in taste
on cushioned couches known as lecti—no longer painful, straight-backed

                       chairs—within the triclinium,
or formal eating room. We’ll drink an entire bottle of cabernet.
                       Or somewhat my pals

will drink the wine for me, since I will be able to’t combine alcohol with
                       the medication I’m on.
They’re just right medication. We’ll have some amusing earlier than Vesuvius blows.

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