April 6, 2020 Poem “Fever”

 

 
Fever
 
A child asked me, “What is the grass?” fetching it to me with full hands…
                        (Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself, 6”)
 
 
Fever took me by surprise.
I was eight years old.
I lay in my room, under a blanket
covered with pictures
of pink roses, and the room
began to whirl. I could not
understand it, found it curiouser
and curiouser. The ceiling
tilted and dropped. The centrifugal
force created, somehow, by my own
body felt as though it would fling
me out of it, as though I had become
a spinning galaxy of heat and light
and pictures and roses that made
a body unneeded. I was puzzled
but not alarmed. I was on fire
with fire that did not consume.
 
My mother brought in the glass
thermometer, held in under
my tongue, kept bringing in trays
with ginger ale and aspirin, water,
sugary puddings after the sun rose.
When the sun fell, my fever broke.
I was still here but changed.
I could hear the pink Queen Elizabeth
roses growing on the other side
of the wall, hear the pellucid slugs
chewing the light green grass, even
the music of starlight streaming
through the willow tree I once fell
from, when the wind was knocked out
of me. Where did it go? I wanted
to know. I felt then that whole universe
unfurled from my home. Soon after
that fever I wrote my first poem.
 
 
Leslie Schultz

5 thoughts on “April 6, 2020 Poem “Fever”

  1. Yes, it is a real memory–I can still see the room exactly. It was a strange coincidence in timing…or causal? Hard to tell.

  2. Wow! What a sensual read this poem was. It felt as if I was experiencing the fever too. And your vocabulary – some excellent words. It is also remarkable the way poems were born of this fever … makes me wonder if it’s a true telling?

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