A Suspicion

Ricardo Pau-Llosa

of ailment breeds

a new season in flesh.

As if snow were suddenly

caking subtropical thatch roofs,

or the desert sogged up

with bitter rain.  Something

hope wishes to keep nameless

might well be welling up

in what now seems a body

with an alien will, 

a yearning to surrender

despite the call to arms,

to fold when the cards sirened

ambition.  And one sits

through the embroidered

language of comfort 

tearing the Latinate of science,

hoping there is no name

for what, therefore, 

cannot threaten.  

And the lumped pain,

the spidery shadow,

and the otherwise ineffable

shift in one’s map

of oneself will fade

like pedestrians in the rearview

mirror in the night rain.

Or the suspicion will 

come into the car

and sit quietly

in the back, an anonymous

citizen of a journey

unaltered but changed

all the same.