Course of Treatment by Linda Pastan
After forty visits, after forty
invisible rays transformed
your body into something
as incandescent as a flashbulb,
they release you into
the world, where it hardly rained
those forty days, those nights, where
your ark was an old SUV shuttling you
back and forth along meandering
highways, taking their daily toll.
Now you embrace the ordinary again—
this small snow shower on the windshield,
which seems in its brevity
to have special meaning—
a shower of angel feathers perhaps,
or the bottle of wine we will
uncork in celebration,
its brothers waiting in a basement
redolent of the earth
you’ve once again escaped.
Art by Nadia Val
Recommended listening: Podcast: Ways of Hearing NPR Tiny Desk Concert: William Bell
Links of the Day: What My Mother and I Don't Talk About Artists whose physical shortcomings led to their signature work + Austin Kleon's #tapeandmagazines experiment
Great Writers on the Letters of the Alphabet, Illustrated by David Hockney