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Initially,  most of the poems I wrote that dealt with my two sons were poems of worry—what disasters might strike them, how could I protect them from life’s raw deals?  And then, as my freshmen writing students would say, it happened.  Our younger son, Ben, age eleven, came down with encephalitis, went into a coma and had to be medevacked from our hometown of Fairbanks, Alaska to Seattle Children’s Hospital.

During that time of personal and family crisis, I began to write poems. I wrote about what we were going through as a kind of therapy. In part, the poems helped to remind me who I had been before the current crisis. I wrote sonnets because the strict form helped focus my attention in the way that working on a difficult crossword puzzle might. But I should say that even at the time I knew they weren’t very good poems. 

When Ben came home from the hospital I put them aside, but several years later I went back and reworked them. I found that the originals, though failures as poems, had a lot of detail I might not otherwise have remembered. They also had a core of emotion that brought the experience back. They became basis of a twenty-four poem sequence called “Spells and Auguries.” The original poems were trying to be tight sonnets, but in revision I loosened them  and added dropped lines to free up the box-like form. Here are six of the re-workings that deal with the early days of the crisis.
 
 
SIRENS AND FLASHING LIGHTS
November 8, 1993; 7 A.M.                                                                             
 
Your cry, half howl, half moan, rocks us awake.
We rush in, find you
                          lurching out of control,
eyes fixed and fingers crimped—our son, eleven,
healthy yesterday. Your body twitches, sways.
Nancy’s about to faint, so I say, “Sit,”
and press her head between
                                     her knees, then phone
for help. She throws things in a bag, sensing
already that our lives have changed.
 
I call again and scream at the dispatcher.
“They’re on their way,” she says, concerned. Our common
thought: your brain in pieces like a shattered            
glass, you may
                   never find yourself again.                 
Sirens and flashing lights intensify
our sense of helplessness as help arrives.
 

 
DIAGNOSIS
8 A.M.
 
Held by a couple of nurses, you thrash
on the table behind a plastic curtain
as the doctor gives
                        a shot to stop
your seizures. “I can’t pin down what he’s got.
We’ll need a spinal tap to rule out
meningitis.” He’s brisk but calm so we’re
calmed too.
      Or numb. I say: “He woke up in
the night but couldn’t tell me where it hurt— 
 
he ‘just felt awful—,’ so I rubbed his back
until he fell asleep.” You’re sleeping now
from the shot. The spinal fluid’s clear,
your skull intact, no drugs and nothing toxic
in the blood. But
                      that’s not good. There’s
only one thing left--your brain itself is sick.
 
 

MEDEVACKED
November 10; 2 A.M.
 
Your blood-pressure spiking triggers a to-do.
The doctors huddle and debate, then strap you
to a gurney, roll
                     you out of ICU
while I stand by in shock. A medic yells, “Go!
Go with them!” but too late. The elevator door
shuts in my face
                     and I race down the stairs and
out to the parking lot, waving a shaky hand
as the ambulance aimed toward the airport
 
rumbles by. Then I go home, pack and catch
a scheduled flight, where
                                 above dawn-lit ice-fields  
I conjure you playing soccer and the violin
again and pray that you’ll wake up with a
working brain. After two days in this coma
it doesn’t seem so unlikely you may die.
           

 
SLEEPLESS TO SEATTLE: NANCY
November 10
 
I wore my parka with two blankets over
like a mummy and they kept asking how
I was and I’d say,
                    'How is he?’ and they’d say,
‘Doing great!’ but the oxygen wasn’t flowing
on the plane so they had to pump this bellows
thing by hand to keep
                           him breathing and
I hadn’t slept for two days and couldn’t stop
my shivers. I must’ve been in shock.
 
Then at the hospital, all hell broke loose.
They crushed in all at once--the specialists--
to hook him up
                 and get their systems going
and one of them came over to me yelling,
‘Christ--why didn’t you bring him sooner?’
as though Fairbanks was right around the corner.
 

 
KIDS BOWLING FOR KIDS
November 11; Seattle
 
Two days before you went into this coma,
your indoor soccer coach had pulled you from
a game saying you
                        looked flushed. Now they’re dosing
you for every bug on earth. “When the brain
swells up inside
                    the skull,” a doctor warns,
“it’s like a melon being squashed.” A social
worker cautions against guilt: “It’s rotten
luck. Don’t blame yourselves.” Everyone else
 
says prayers and my disbelief is shaken
so I say them too. Children in wheelchairs
or on crutches touch
                           us closer. One mother
long past tears describes her son’s fierce tumor.
“Kids Bowling for Kids” is where we stay with other
families in crisis walking back and forth.
 

 
INTENSIVE CARE
November 13, 1993
 
The delicate hiss of the pump pulling
phlegm from your chest, green
                                          scribbles on the screen
snaking up and down, and a nurse on
permanent duty who says just ignore
those stats and look at the calm sleeping face
of the boy with the tube up his nose, the drip
in his arm and
                  the probe screwed into his skull
gauging pressure on the brain—just watch
 
his steady breathing. Something is there
inside that was almost taken away,
something coiled and firm waits for another
day, to stick out his tongue on command
and open his
                 bleary eyes and when asked,
“Who is that?” to say, “Why that’s my dad.”

Note: In spite of his resulting health issues, Ben made it through college and earned a graduate performance degree in violin. He’s currently a member of the Whatcom Symphony in Bellingham, Washington. ​