What I Saw

This morning, the hoary light in the guest room where my husband now sleeps frosts him with a silver shadow, turns his spare body hair white, his head hair, once dark, a willow’s worth, to fuzz on felt. I watch him rise from the edge of the bed, shuffle forward in baggy boxers, a basket of medications in both hands, held out like an offering, held out like the plates of food he hands back to me because he is too sick to eat. He looks ancient, a golem, still broad but bent shoulders narrow too narrowly, a street puppet wavering on stilts, bracing for the next blow, a marionette whose master is cancer.