poem

 Op Note XI

He had been gashed wide open by something sharp and fierce.  We washed it out.  Fragments of metal and lots of muck and dirt and gray gravel. Raw glistening sinews and bone. High velocity trauma.  He screamed not to close it up.  My wounds are my own, he said.  So we left what was there and rinsed it clean and let them all heal by secondary intention.  He eventually filled in the gaps and clefts with what he had eaten. Gradually growing himself back together again.  It took months of painful dressing changes.  We watched them get shallower and shallower, a slow accretion of moist granulated pinkness. His scars would be ghastly; wide and amorphous, dull and glassy surfaced. But in the end, his own wholeness.      

11/11/21