above ground

sam floyd

If I had ten just like you, the doctor told my wife,

I’d expect eight to survive.

 

She meant, survive to die of something other than

breast cancer.

 

My wife has a friend who smokes heavily and rides a

motorcycle to work every day;

she was disappointed that he planned to quit smoking

but then decided not to.

 

My feeling was that if he didn’t also plan to stop

riding his motorcycle, there wasn’t much point in

his quitting smoking.

 

I’m losing my life and my wife every day.

I’m not sure anymore to what extent I ever really

had either.  I’ve been pretty stupid actually,

about the whole thing.

 

A famous avatar has remarked, so I’m told:

We are not our bodies.

 

My wife, however, has fought a war the last six months

for her body, beaten back the enemy.

Now we are mourning the losses that come with war.

 

According to an unpublished Court of Appeals

decision I read at the office the other day,

the Commonwealth indicted three men for raping “T.D.”

on the darkened porch of a burned-out house

while they sat drinking and taking pills.

 

“Following these attacks,” the opinion recounted,

“the men trundled the victim, naked but for a sleeping

bag wrapped around her, deep into the woods

where she was raped once again.  An eyewitness described

his incredulity as he watched Appellant next lead

the victim to a newly dug grave into which she silently

laid herself down.  Appellant then pulled back the hammer

of his sawed-off shotgun and killed T.D.”

 

A fellow prosecutor reminded me recently, as we spoke of my

wife’s illness:  Every day above ground is a good day.

 

Perhaps T.D. came to believe otherwise.

 

I see myself these days as a face in a streak of

rainwater, a dark reflection on wet glass.  Rooms are visible

behind me, with walls connected by doors and angles.

 

While I am not my body, I believe that every day my body is

above ground may or may not be a good one.

 

According to current defense estimates, at least eighty percent

of my wife has survived the war but not all of that

eighty percent has come home to me yet.

Maybe some of it never will, forever missing in action.

 

It’s like how you know in a given situation, when the

attorneys show up, regardless of how the litigation turns out,

you’re screwed.

 

All of the wife I knew died when she found the lump,

but I didn’t realize it at the time.

 

I am now married to a luminous apparition with scars.

She is grieving and healing, brilliant and shining.

In many respects she is still much too hot to handle.

 

Since I never expected to have a wife, I am continually

amazed.  Transfigured, she has become a meteor shower

passing through the house, a promise of new life,

a wondrous sign in the heavens.

 

The guy who committed the rape and murder was not

sentenced to death.  He got seventy years.  He survived

to die of something else.

 

I change constantly like a downpour against

a midnight window.  I have never been my body.

The one I was born with is long gone.  The one I’ve got

now is smeared, wearing thin.

 

I can’t possibly love my wife enough.  How can I

when all the bodies I love most keep dissolving

day in and day out in a landscape of statistical probabilities,

a thunder storm of fractions, and I can only see them

in muzzle flashes, scalpel slashes,

lightning splashes.  A deluge of blessings poured

like piss out of a boot.

 

I am still in the primordial soup.  I’ve never left it.

 

I see the outline of who I’m not, changing from who

I wasn’t into what I won’t be ever.  I’m standing in

a very shallow grave.

 

If there were ten just like me, I doubt I’d recognize

any of them, but I hope none of them ever gets

the cancer, and I hope none of them ever does

what the rapist with the shotgun did.  And I’d donate

every single one of them to the Salvation Army

if it would spare my wife the suffering she’s endured.

 

After six months of war, I’m sick of being helpless

on the home front.

 

Maybe we’ll eliminate war someday,

and capital punishment.  Maybe we should.  Maybe

we’ll find a cure for cancer.  We’ll never eliminate

the carnage though, not so long as we

live in our bodies, not so long as there are cigarettes

to smoke and motorcycles to ride.

 

The odds will simply remain against it,

so long as every day above ground—no matter how

God-awful—is a good one, and every night

the heavens—no matter how impenetrably black—are

alive with signs and wonders.

 
 

Sam Floyd lives in Louisville, Kentucky. He recently fulfilled MFA degree requirements at Eastern Kentucky University’s Bluegrass Writers Studio with the completion of his poetry collection, Broken Rules and Ugly Rumors. His poetry has appeared in Little Somethings Press and The Heartland Review.