measure

 "Measure" is a poem about my true love, Mario, and an event that actually happened.

At the Cairo Hospital...looking at my true love.

February is a short month when
couples measure love

in strange ways:

waterfront restaurants, candle-lit dinners, long-stemmed roses,

 diamonds, proposals, making love, roaoring fires...

Measures of love, pitted against

each other, their spurred talons and greased 

feathers flying. I don't want to play.

My true love doesn't do waterfront restaurants.
I once ordered Maine lobster at market price, a mistake

we've never repeated. He would never buy diamonds, 

after seeing the toil of mine labor, 

and gives me potted, living roses, “not falling

for overpriced, drying flowers in cellophane.”

His idea of a roaring fire is at the end of a good cigar.
But he puts the seat down, does the laundry,

and has strong arms. 

These arms 

once supported me as I
tried to act normal, plodding
up stairs in Cairo—uneven stone

steps in front of a hospital—littered
with candy wrappers. Women in black

wool hijabs looked at me, intense eyes begging 

me not to touch them. They kept hands tucked beneath 

their dresses, not outstretched to me, their figures leaning

away from my shadow as we passed. Wide-eyes, terror filled, stared 

at us, and made me think I was dying. But as we walked, his arms lifted me 

just enough for my steps to feel easier. 

Weak from blood loss, no fluid was staying inside

my eyes, my body, even my blood was sandy. We had to 

could we? stop the bleeding. I  focused everything I had 

to lean on him, his primal scent of perspiration, one hand clasped 

over mine.

So many stone steps, uneven path to healing, stones

between us and the surgeon. I had to stop twice, 

and when I cried, the women hid their faces. 

He kept whispering: “A few more steps, just

a few more steps…” And I took one up, and then two,

and neither of us knew the way, but he whispered “just 

a few more steps” anyway. I pleaded to stop and lie down. 

He shook his head, and didn't feel sorry for me, and the hospital 

was there, at the end of the steps, just like he said it would be.

My measure of romance will always be this:
The strength of his arms, and his whispers, leading me.

When my self is a weak, bleeding, staggering
thing, and the world is a bleak place with
long, stony paths, all uneven, he steadies me.
Moreover, he believes I can do it and says so.

I get there with him, one step at a time.
He knows me and walks beside me
anyway.

On steps like these,
too weak and bloodless 

to stop crying, having nothing 

left to give, he asks me for nothing
and expects nothing. He never leaves.
This is the measure of my true love’s heart.