what you said that cracked us up
until we sank back on the bed
and sighed. The truth is, we were never
more in love than we were then,
when all the chemo, radiation,
everything was over. We
held hands. Sometimes, I’d lean across
to readjust your cannula
to help you breathe. Sometimes, I’d dream
that we were drifting down a river,
neither of us noticing
that the river we were drifting down
had grown too wide to see the shore
on either side. It’s just a dream,
I’d tell myself. But dreams are how
we travel through the dark, and why
I heard the hiss of oxygen—
the plash of waves against our bow—
when my mind turned to you this morning,
trying to remember, decade
after decade, what you said.