Therése Halscheid

THE NEVER-SAID SURGEON

When the recovery time passed
yet it seemed

you were still under sedation –

and the critical sun
stretched again toward your stillness
and yet another pale light from the moon
lifted and left

the surgeon also started to rise, each night
pacing the safe halls of his home.

What moved under his skin
was an undisclosed error –
the oxygen you were derived of,
the machine which failed
long enough to cause something wrong.

This, the surgeon hid through
the next series of suns and moons
cast even more worry,
this he thought of only in late hours,
filling his lungs with
sleepless regret, just walking out truths
that no one must
wake to.

And it went on that way, and on so
he could learn to forget
what you, my father, did not know
to remember.

* * *

WHITE SOCK

They stitched your name
down the white length of me
and that meant
the end of waking –
that stopped all the lovely
sounding of leaves,
the touching green of the grass.

C h a r l e s
it said simply.

But what it meant
really, was to endure
the worn notion
of being stretched
always over your hand.

And what it became for me,
was to live out my life
lifting to highways
on your forehead
running long
without a landscape of reason

rubbing the damaged brain -
to seek a sort of consciousness.

Therése Halscheid received a 2003 Fellowship for Poetry from the New Jersey Council for the Arts. Her poetry has appeared in many magazines including 13th Moon, Faultline, Rhino, and White Pelican. Her third book, Uncommon Geography, was published in 2005 and in 2007 Greatest Hits was published by Puddinghouse Press as part of their series of the same name. Halscheid's poetry and information about her books can also be seen on her website ThereseHalscheid.com. She teaches creative writing workshops and is a teaching artist in schools throughout the New Jersey Council of Arts.