Getting Out of Bed After Surgery

This site has no industrial crane that swings

an arm around and lowers it to receive

a load to raise—pallets of bricks for a wall

or rods of steel rebar that will arc

in a bridge high over a river: here is only

a bed, the low hill of a sheet, and an older

man whose gears, stiff with disuse, are leveraging

his body, first untucking the legs to lower

them down to the floor, then bracing the beam

of a left arm against the mattress, the right hand

gripping a bed rail, and then the engine of pain

turns the whole contraption of bone and flesh

into a slow motion, up in increments

like a demolition film that’s run in reverse

until a newer center of gravity is reached,

and the laws of physics require that whatever is down

must rise to meet a life that stands waiting.