For weeks after his surgery,
toes reset and entombed,
my husband, who never stops doing, 
never sits, sat.
     No pain, just hours in a chair,
a totem of books, news quieted
to a drone.
     I’d pass him on my way to the kitchen,
push his scooter from my path. 
     I thought of him as Humpty Dumpty,
told myself he was fine.
     I awoke to discover him sitting,
back hard against the cold bedroom wall,
hand pressing his side as if stopping
an unspooling seam.
     What? I had said. What’s wrong?
I allowed his lies of sleeplessness.
    I couldn’t see the suffering
of the man who grew a garden—
    Jersey reds, sungolds,
    beans spilling from vines like green rain,
that fed us, and the deer, and great drifts of bees.
     But no lie could change the color of his skin,
bleached to bone on the morning 
drive to the hospital.
      He said the X-rays were almost beautiful:
the sturdy rope of spine, dark wings of lungs,
each a host to a single blood clot, a gray pearl
that could have—but didn’t—
take him from me.