The Company of Sticks

Sickness, like everything, is wavy.
Wavular. Wavily washing you
Under the waves. The writers you like

For writing with nothing much at all,
A few books, remembered accolades,
Or no accolades, a hut, a cell,

You know they’re mostly mythology,
But you consider what it was like
For Stonehouse when he was holed up sick,

No one to tend his garden for him
While he recovered, maybe tending
The hearth where he nursed his smoky sticks.

Or Irina Ratushinskaya,
When she etched her prison poems in soap
With burnt matchsticks, what was that like, sick?

Writing through sickness is a mercy.
It does nothing to ease being sick,
But it’s company, under the waves.