Flare

I have sat in this same
padded-plastic bedside chair
so many times now
in different rooms and buildings.
With husband,
with son,
now with other son.

I’m learning to be at peace here,
maybe even to appreciate this time-suspended state
where the only expectation is to
be present
and wait.

Amidst curlicues of tubes and wires,
mysterious instruments with Latin names,
washable surfaces
and impersonal rounded corners,
I could easily be annoyed or alarmed
by the pounds of plastic and drugs
that have kept all my men
alive.

But instead,
as I sit in headachey gray flatness
I imagine the blinking lights as festive décor,
the drips and bleeps as music
celebrating this complicated mess
of technology and training.

For if this had been a century ago
I would surely have lost
all three of them by now.