Capolavoro
"In sickness and in health" is a marriage vow that my husband has upheld again and again.
A wonderful prompt: THE CUT-AND-SHUFFLE POEM by Jack Myers, from “The Practice of Poetry” (p. 114) edited by Robin Behn & Chase Twichell.
“Write out (in prose form, if you like) two completely unrelated and emotionally opposite six- to ten-line dramatic situations, depicting
a physically inactive or quiet scene, and
a physically active or emotionally charged scene.
Then, as one might shuffle the playing cards in a deck, alternate the first line or two from scene 1 with the first line or two from scene 2, then the second line or so from scene 1 with the second line or so from scene 2, and so forth, until all the lines from the two scenes are roughly dovetailed into a single stanzaic unit.”
Our bathroom is so small. but it’s right across the hall. My parents took me and my younger sister to Italy the summer before I got engaged. It’s next to our bedroom, also small. It’s a house from the nineteen-fifties and we love it. Everywhere we went, lights flashed from cameras held high because this was before smartphones hung in every hand. But it is not spacious. We live pressed together. People carried cameras everywhere, in little black bags crowding "Mona Lisa" to take a picture from ten feet away. I keep the supplies on a high shelf like a secret. Up the stairs of the Duomo and down again, step by stone step, my father in Birkenstocks and socks. My husband sits on the little stool our children use to reach the sink. We moved our heads together in the Colosseum. I felt the shape of shells in the thrall-driven walls. His hands reach for me, unraveling dressings where wounds are weeping. We walked down the streets in Florence my father in the lead, gelato in hand. He replaces them with gauze dabbed in salve intended to keep more infections at bay. It was so hot and the gelato was so cool and my mom and I would stop for espresso. He bends his head to the task. I ask him, embarrassed, “I guess this is the ‘For better or for worse’ part, right?” We drank our espresso with little batons of sugar and stepped away again into cobbled streets. He tells me, “This is the ‘in sickness and in health’ part." Then he uses surgical tape to hold the bandages in place. We drifted over the little bridges of Venice and gondoliers oared down canals at dusk.
Beautiful
My husband has held up that particular vow over and over again, too. 🧡