On Friday
March a week ago
at 4 AM a Waukesha ambulance
picked me up at the Odd Fellows hall on South Street.
After rapidly checking my vitals first upstairs
then hauling me inside, the several attendants continued working on me
then hauling me inside, the several attendants continued working on me
before we got rolling to the hospital hill ER.
After 3 - 4 days of dehydratng I'd succumbed to
a case of viral pneumonia
it was determined.
The doctors at the airplane hangar
-it seemed like - hallucinating -
at Waukesha Memorial
had me under control quickly -
going through their checklist of things
that could be wrong with me
given my history.
After a couple days of administering IV fluids
and antibiotics in intensive care
I was transferred to the regular patient population
and on Tuesday this week I was released
to the world at large.
That is why there was no raccoon last Saturday.
This remedial sortie was endorsed, embraced and underwritten by my good partner, Dee.
Life has taken on its usual madcapacity again.
This get well card sent by friend Wm.
^,^
going through their checklist of things
that could be wrong with me
given my history.
After a couple days of administering IV fluids
and antibiotics in intensive care
I was transferred to the regular patient population
and on Tuesday this week I was released
to the world at large.
That is why there was no raccoon last Saturday.
This remedial sortie was endorsed, embraced and underwritten by my good partner, Dee.
This get well card sent by friend Wm.
^,^
A Person of Limited Palette
by Ted Kooser
Listen Online
I would love to have lived out my years
in a cottage a few blocks from the sea,
and to have spent my mornings painting
out in the cold, wet rocks, to be known
as “a local artist,” a pleasant old man
who “paints passably well, in a traditional
manner,” though a person of limited
talent, of limited palette: earth tones
and predictable blues, snap-brim cloth cap
and cardigan, baggy old trousers
and comfortable shoes, but none of this
shall come to pass, for every day
the possibilities grow fewer, like swallows
in autumn. If you should come looking
for me, you’ll find me here, in Nebraska,
thirty miles south of the broad Platte River,
right under the flyway of dreams.
"A Person of Limited Palette" by Ted Kooser from Splitting an Order. © Copper Canyon Press, 2014
^,^
