Another CT scan for my wife and once again
I’m thinking about Christopher Walken.
My hands grip the wheel—ten and two.
Handicap tag waves from its honored post
on the mirror.
In my head,
that scene from Seven Psychopaths when
Walken tells his wife: God loves us very much.
He just has a funny way of showing it some-
times.
Maybe you snickered at Walken’s apologetics,
the heartfelt theology of a petty thief.
But it makes me squirm.
Where was that love when the insurance company
didn’t cover the prescription my wife needed?
Or when the specialist she found wouldn’t take on
one new patient?
No heavenly chorus resounded from the skies
demanding a change of heart.
It’s starting to rain as I roll into the hospital’s
overflowing lot, a two-acre Rubik’s cube of cars.
I spot one empty handicap space right beside
the front door.
Maybe this is it, I think,
the balancing out of God’s love, a reckoning
amid all the pain.
But then I hear my wife say, Let’s keep going.
Leave that spot for someone else
who needs it more than I do.
by Ken Hines
You can read Ken Hines’s poetry in Rattle, Rust & Moth, Burningword Journal, Psaltery & Lyre, and other magazines. You’ll find his essays in Barrelhouse, The Millions, and Philosophy Now. A recent Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his wife, Fran.
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