My first elegy...

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Callear's Legs

How do I say
that I would do anything
one sarcomere short of everything
to transplant my lateral motor neurons

to your spinal cord.
That I would crawl through
the fence and cocoon myself
around the transformer, combusting

into a thousand trillion nerve cells if
the sparks could massage
the sclerosis out of your atrophied tissue.
That I would roll myself into sheaths, bulk

myself into muscle, scissor the skin and
unscrew my femoral heads
from their hip sockets to see you not even run,
not even bike

not even take the stairs
to your third-floor workspace, but
walk
from the passenger seat of your wife's Ford

to the building's door without
the walker
and without
the clenched grimace of the determination

needed to drag two limbs that are
uninterested - no, abhorrent of
being called your own. You.
You who taught me of the heart like no man

I have ever met: EKGs and angiograms;
treadmill, dobutamine, and nuclear
stress tests; ejection fractions, x-rays, angioplasties,
stents, Holters, AICDs; valves, arteries, atriums and

ventricles.
Never before had the ugly mass
inside my chest been so much more beautiful
than vintage handmade Valentines, salutations

concluding sincere love letters, dots of the "i"s of
third-grade girls' handwritten
history essays, gold and ruby lockets hanging
from slim throats housing thumbnail photographs

of boys
who think jewelry is an easier way to get
inside a girl than whispering
something cardiac.

Never before had I understood that my circular
nature was more
than psychological; that when I
could not speak,

I could still pump my heart
to pump my legs
to pump the pedals,

and it would be enough.
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