Winter Garden

I am                 trying
            to convince my partner of ten years               that it’s his time to carry a burden
get the procedure        that will save me from death,
 
            whether by explosion or clot              these are just semantics
                        when you’ve been,                  yourself,                      the one on the table
dying.
 
“Even if you weren’t with me, you still don’t want children, do you?”
 
I ask                but don’t say               I do, I do.
            I can’t              and I won’t                  but lord almighty, if there is a lord, don’t smite
me down for the                lie                    on my lips.
 
Who, after all, will teach me how to be tender                      again
how to be                    kind and          to look:
            how to examine the small green inch worms             drifting down from the maple,
how to             squish mud between toes                    and                  see elephants
            in clouds                     and good god, how to love;    how to love?
 
“It’s your turn, you need to carry some of this. It’s yours to bear too, not just mine.”
 
There is nothing that isn’t mine and mine alone.
This child                    that we won’t have.
The child                     that I didn’t have but tried to make.
Those children            running in the sprinkler in our back lawn,
mine—not mine.         
Not yours:       hair not blonde and                 ratted in the back from        
            fitful sleeps                 and fistfuls of righteous anger.
 
I want you to get         fixed                but it’s me       
unfixed, 
unmothering,              
unlabored,
 
labored by the labor of mothering my            body                in illness:
            in sickness       and in death                which we don’t, yet, haven’t, won’t
            
pledge.            
 
But me, here,               asking for this small mercy.
 
It’s almost snowing.                I’m a winter baby
in a winter       world.              
Keep these hands from           
            cracking under the pressure on frozen            soil.
 
                        Keep these hands of mine                   from
sowing.