While waiting for the Percoset to kick in,
and the Spinal to bid goodbye, (thus far
I can tense the muscles in my right thigh, only), so
I can walk, and pee, and get home,
and while trying to breathe out in a hiss through the cramping of my missing womb,
(though to be clear I will not miss it, its job is long-done and unsavory characters
have taken up there, wreaking havoc and driving down property values),
one of the passel of nurses that pokes and squeezes and measures me
comes in and says:
“Ach, she’s only a wee thing” with her Scottish brogue
and this makes me love her, since I am not wee by a long shot –
short, I’ll give her that, but built much like a fire hydrant
in the late 60s;
I want her to stay and ask her, as the drugs wend their way
from the magical portal in my arm to my very core (which is contracting
around its stolen goods as if to bring them back),
what part of Scotland she’s from, and tell her that
I’ve been to Arbroath, of all places,
in 1990, and saw Nessie in the loch at Inverness,
that I illegally jumped a wrought iron fence after hours to
explore Glasgow’s Necropolis,
sat in tiny living rooms in Dumbarton
belonging to grandmothers other than mine
who served tiny cups of tea
and sugared, crumbly biscuits from tiny kitchens,
that I posed with a Highland cow, drank too much in clubs
and instead of a boy, fell in love with Uig, and the Isle of Skye, with its moody
broad flat sea shining in the evening light
and with its rolling hills that rose up on their elbows
just a little,
enough to be interesting but not arduous,
and then settled there to forever watch the slanting golden hue
slowly abandon the summer sky,
light that lingered much longer
than we dared dream.
Halfway North 