Science

Let It, she’d penned on her East Hall
office wall, glassless, framed in gilt.

What does it mean? I ventured.
Not to take discomfort as a sign to stop.

A reminder to let it hurt.
We were there to discuss my thesis,

but I wondered about that book
she was writing for years. The one

she had to let. At the time all I knew
of resilience was bouncing back

from a hangover. Was calling one
more time. Work hard, get tough,

build character, put your back into it—
never let it hurt so much you cannot go on,

then let it hurt some more. Until
I was forty, and aching for another child.

Easy turned to difficult
to unlikely then requiring of a miracle.

Yesterday, the child we created
—spoiler alert—

the child, saying goodbye to his dying
grandfather, asks, but couldn’t there be a miracle?

No. Nothing to fix the man.
Seven years ago we had syringes

and test tubes, a stranger’s oocyte,
intracytoplasmic sperm injection, assisted

hatching. We had science. Science, the miracle.
Science, the limit. Science giveth life

and taketh it away—something like that.
The dog can smell the cancer

and scurries out. The oxygen machine
whooshes and heaves. The child opens

his palm to receive a shark tooth collected
in the 1960s in the South Seas. It is almost too much

when the man says, I love you, Buddy.
Let it, let it, let it, let it, let it.