Our hour at the clinic, test
results and what the doctor guessed.
Then the bright intensity
out on Industrial Boulevard,
the late October sun so hard
and air so crisp that everything
felt close and brash and nearly stung.
Silent, you walked next to me.
And I was there to comfort you,
but doing what you had to do
and walking on, you seemed to find
new confidence I want to call
grown up, strong willed, responsible.
But also, something not so nice,
or good thing at too steep a price:
pain channels, concentrates the mind.
And so to watch you at the lake
last night, to see the way you look,
healthier, astonished me. Though
you were with friends, that same remove
(or less remove—more resolve)
showed in your stern, down-bitten jaw,
and the sternness held, I saw,
its opposite: in the glow
drifting from the concession stand
while you and your friends hung round
laughing and flirting, I glimpsed your hair,
grown long now, floating at the center
of that circle you would enter
and then pull back from. Standing in-
between, you turned it—jagged shine
you carry with you everywhere.
Peter Campion is the author of Radical as Reality: Form and Freedom in American Poetry, four collections of poems, and several monographs and catalog essays on visual art. He teaches at the University of Minnesota.
