Christian Sammartino
Vigil
Your breath arriving in torrential gasps
while you sleep in this hospital bed
is the first thunderstorm of spring.
Lightning’s silver fingers explode from your mouth,
illuminating translucent hospital gowns, frantically
clinging to a clothes line above our bodies.
Those gowns murmur the muscle memory
your body spent summers crafting, then tucked
inside those gossamer threads.
As the fabric fills with barrels of rainwater,
your lungs recall the shape they made when
you first inhaled the scent of wild junipers.
When you gazed through Angel’s Window and
promised to grow up as patiently as the Colorado River.
How you breathed so deeply the whole sky
above the Grand Canyon inhabited your lungs.
As if to say, joy chooses to live in the absences
we carve, the spaces we convince to be sacred.
Your breath begs the ecstatic air, crackling
with florescent light, to transform into a body
who can inhabit the contours of that holy shape.
Thrashing tongues of wind threaten to tear
the gowns off the line and shred them until
the tatters blow through the streets,
like tumbleweeds christening a town full of ghosts.
I keep vigil over year bedside, monitoring
the storm that threatens to steel you from me
on a Doppler Radar—call me a tornado chaser
in the eye of the funnel cloud. call me a dumb
daredevil for holding your hand.
Wake up from this and call me anything.
I will stay up all night with a needle and thread,
coaxing my hands to sew a blanket from the cloth
you discard in the wind. Stitch by stitch,
I will make a patchwork quilt
out of your vanishing breaths.
I will carry your joy around my shoulders
like a prayer shawl. I will make
my body a cathedral carved and blessed
with the shroud from your tabernacle.
I vow to worship by your bedside, until
your fever breaks, until your hospital bracelet
is cut from your wrist—until you trade
the shape of your hospital gown for the shape
you make in my old shirt—until your lungs
are strong enough to say my name again.
—Submitted on 09/12/2020
Christian Sammartino is the founding editor of the Rising Phoenix Review. His poems have appeared in Yes Poetry, Rogue Agent, Apiary, Tilde, Ghost City Press, and other journals. Sammartino studied religion and philosophy at West Chester University, and is a library communications technician at Francis Harvey Green Library. When he is not writing poetry, or creating new graphic designs for his library, you can find him hiking through Pennsylvania’s state parks with his wife Kelsey.
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