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