After Another Diagnosis

William Varner

Somewhere, someone right now on a ride home
is mispronouncing the word creatinine, trying 
to remember the doctor’s dusky voice. 
He’ll drive past fields along the nine miles home,
past deer, their long necks sloped down, tongues 
touching grass, a red fox staring from the edge of a field.
There are other words he can’t say right, acronyms 
he can’t remember what the letters stood for. 
He imagines what’s down in the dark wilds 
of his back, how blood moves through organs, 
pushes and erodes the stone walled canals.
The driveway is the same as he left it, the garage door 
still broken where once he backed into it, not looking
at the camera and its colored ladder of bars.   
There’ll be no facing the dogs and their jumping up,
no opening cans to feed the cats, their strong pressure 
welcome against his calves. He’ll go straight to the garden 
and sit on a wrought iron chair, place his paperwork  
and doctor’s notes and next appointment reminders 
face down, the backsides of staples like folded arms. 
Once, he tore up the flowers in his aunt’s garden
and as a lesson she taught him to grow them back 
from seeds, how long it took for the green curl to 
emerge, straighten, and grow. All summer they  
worked in the garden, and she taught him how to deadhead
flowers, the twist and snap and tear, her legs varicose 
when she knelt beside him. They spent nights learning
the constellations, drawing a line with her finger, 
teaching him how people created the myths anew, 
the difference between a waxing and waning moon.
The sounds in the backyard aren’t a symphony
just different sounds of insects, call and response
of wrens and jays, the caesura of bees’ wings  
when they stop to fill their saddlebags with pollen. 
The sound of a crow puncturing the heat of July.
He’s left the garden untended, the mint taking over 
and tangling with thorned plants he abandoned pulling,
new shoots from the lilac bush he’d cut to the ground beginning
to reach up through all the twisting and turning green.
Six rhododendrons line the fence against his neighbor’s yard.
O how he loves to say the word Rho do Den dron,
the way each syllable pulses through his half-open mouth.

William Varner is a poet living with multiple disabilities and chronic illness. His work has appeared in Cimarron Review, The Cincinnati Review, Dialogist, Green Mountains Review, Harpur Palate, JAMA, New Ohio Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. He's been a finalist for the Erskine J. Award from Smartish Pace and the Maine Literary Award. His chapbook, Leaving Erebus, was the winner of the Keystone Chapbook Series in 2019.