Poet's Choice: 'Seeds' By Kevin Prufer

We'd driven from our rural town to Kansas City because my fiancée had been feeling out of breath recently, had had an irregular stress test, and her general practitioner wanted her to have a couple further tests at a larger hospital. We thought we'd make a little vacation of it -- have dinner out, stay in a hotel, enjoy ourselves a bit.

"The good news," her new doctor said the next morning, "is that you're in terrific health. The bad news is you need quadruple bypass surgery right away." In the end, she spent many days in the ICU, her heart stopped twice, and it was almost a year before she felt truly healthy again.

I wrote the first draft of this poem during one of my evenings alone at home, after having spent several nights hovering around her hospital bed watching her sleep. I'd just cooked dinner for myself, and the house seemed weirdly quiet. I could hear the faucet dripping in the kitchen. I built the poem around that sensation -- the unfamiliar silences of an empty house, the miles between us, the sound of the faucet in the next room.

In general, I resist writing about myself. There are so many more interesting stories in the (often invented) lives of others. This, however, is that rare exception -- a poem born immediately of worry and despair. I thought that by writing about it I could escape my sense of desperation and get some sleep; paradoxically, I also ended up preserving it.

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Seeds

The pepper on the cutting board and the seeds inside it:

a tiny congregation in a doomed church.

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Or the sliced cantaloupe and its stringy heart --

sweet and slick, the closest thing to rot.

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I was thinking of you when, distracted, I cut my hand