Poet's Choice: 'Seeds' by Kevin Prufer

By Kevin Prufer
Sunday, July 26, 2009

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.

(Editor's note: To see this poem laid out correctly on paper or on your screen, click the Print button in the Toolbox.)

Seeds

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

a tiny congregation in a doomed church.

.

Or the sliced cantaloupe and its stringy heart --

sweet and slick, the closest thing to rot.

.

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

so blood pearled, then, seed-like, dripped into the sink.

.

I was thinking of the thick blue vein

where the IV goes.

.

(Or the mourner who planted his wife beneath his window.

She didn't sprout. She didn't sprout.

.

Then, one day, an onion shoot,

which he devoured.)

.

Darling, do not die tonight. The doctors are good,

the hospital quiet as a pill beneath chaff-like stars.

.

Darling, I brought you flowers and sat by your bed

until the white moon rolled behind the towers.

.

These days, the faucets won't stop dripping,

and I stand in the kitchen dreaming of nurses

.

who roam the white halls like quiet animals --

and you, in your bed, unable to call them.

"Seeds" is from Kevin Prufer's upcoming collection, "Little Paper Sacrifice." His "National Anthem" was named by Publishers Weekly as one of the best five poetry books of 2008. He is the editor of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.