Tonsil-Free

10:20 PM, Friday night. Home and Gabe is sleeping now, all doped up. The tonsils are out, and we are settled in for a week's wait to recover him and to hear about the biopsy. The Indian surgeon (named Jacob Johnson!) said it looked like a bad infection in there and probably not cancer. Yay!

The boys are fine, and sleeping cozily. Gabe's Mom did everything, everything, plus baths and cookie-making.

I am so grateful to be home. I get frightened when we go into the hospital. Maybe it isn't fair to the people who work there, but I always feel like we've entered the machine.

Just before he went into surgery I recited all the poems I know by heart (it's just two) for Gabriel to try to put a spell on him.

Then when I left the hospital tonight to bring the car around the moon greeted me in perfect stillness, like the face of a child of mine, asleep. And I remembered this excerpt from Stanley Kunitz's poem, Vita Nuova, which I've quoted here before, but:

Moon of the soul, accompany me now,
Shine on the colosseums of my sense,
Be in the tabernacles of my brow.
My dark will make, reflecting from your stones,
The single beam of all my life intense.

Good night!