Avium

A woman with stick-thin arms and long white hair
stands behind the register at your local bookstore.
She seems tired; you hope she knows what she’s doing.

When she appears at your side with a book you’ve been 
looking for, her pale yet firm gaze makes you realize 
she’s Marjorie, formerly raven haired and fuller of body,

now with hollow cheeks, wilted limbs, and mottled skin.
And you are she, yourself diagnosed with mycobacterium avium,
sister of TB. You don’t know what’s with Marjorie,

but you almost love her as you gird your loins for a cure 
worse than the disease. Imagining two years of drugs
in your still-able body that climbs hills and sings,

you can’t stop wondering how you got this thing. Yet
it must be said avium blesses you with a meaning hardly 
to be believed: “a solitary, pathless region, a desert.”

Haven’t you always wanted to live in a tree, go on walkabouts, 
be overwhelmed by visions? Since girlhood you’ve admired Christ 
tempted in the wilderness, and even the children of Israel,

wandering forty years, though you don’t much care for trumpets. 
Truth is, you can’t stop exchanging the present for the future and past. 
Now it all feels divinely ordained: two years at the edge,

medicine bag hanging from your neck, learning compassion; 
two years of yellow brittlebush, sage, chaparral beardtongue; 
two years stepping over the scorpion sunning on the stone.

Of course you’ll suffer, but you’ll have need of new prayers. 
Not to be healed, but to live another day. Another day to hear 
the red finch sing from the top of your lean-to; another day

for the bobcat to slink past the firepit at dawn, for the tarantula hawk
wasp, all royal-blue abdomen and copper wing, to circle your camp, 
its terrible second-to-worst sting the sentry of your freedom.

Don’t ask why you never understood until today: 
There’s no more running fore and aft. There is only 
here and now, and the breath you’re trying to save.