Wager
I will assert
that, no, a man
does not sit at the sickbed of his wife
holding her hand
if he has not inquired in some earlier time
about the freckles —“or are these moles?” —
accumulating on her left breast
or, before that, if he did not wake up one day and say,
for instance, “last night
I dreamed we counted four hundred and forty-four fish,
imagine! lying on the roadside
in the dark.” Or if he had never remarked
that the strands of her hair, which he pulled from his sweater,
might well have been there all year long;
Or if he were not the type to say to her, while removing
an orange seed from his mouth with his fingers,
his right cheek crumbed with toast,
wait, say it again, tell that part again.
Instead, I assert
that the proverbial Man at the sickbed of his possibly dying Wife
who has not said and seen these things, or others like them,
while he does sit with her at her bedside in the room,
he does not hold her hand.
Winner of New Millennium Writing’s 2008
Creative Nonfiction Prize and also American Poetry Journal’s 2007
American Poet’s Prize, Mil Norman-Risch has published poetry in a number
of journals, including Willow Springs, White Pelican Review,
Sojourners, Freshwater, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Common Ground, and Avatar
Review. A poem of hers is featured in Agha Shahid Ali’s anthology, Ravishing
DisUnities, (Wesleyan University Press, 2001). She teaches and writes in
Richmond, Virginia.