☀ Today's Poem: "The Remedy" Nicholas Friedman

after a drawing by Watteau

She looks calmed by the nurse's hand,
which reaches for a sloping buttock while
the other readies a clyster syringe.

I stand plausibly between this drawing
and another—one with no nudity, no nipple
brushing the red-crayon duvet

on which a woman lies in half-repose,
waiting for that rush of warm water.
I swear she's almost smiling.

For nearly an hour, my wife has been lost
in a Flemish world of peasantry and the hunt.
But now I notice her returning, and when

she's just behind me, I ask what she thinks.
"I like it," she says. "I'm guessing you like
the colors? Or is it just her nice—?" A joke,

meaning the softness of that curve,
my attention for it. Of course, it's true,
but more than Watteau's willing figure,

I'm thinking of my own, on its side,
knees drawn up like a child napping.
And I'm thinking how the gown

slides down off my thigh, baring the full
nakedness of my back, like in a worry dream.
A nurse checks the propofol IV,

and the doctor asks if I'm alright
with being observed by an intern.
After I say okay, a woman enters—

white-coated, stunningly young. I'm thinking
of the gown's tiny red poppies, and how
they're suddenly absurd, she is so beautiful.

I'm thinking of that humid afternoon
my brother took an aluminum bat
to the face when Danny hit a home run

into the neighbor's lawn. Danny rounded
two makeshift bases before noticing the blood
that came in rills from my brother's nose.

He just sort of moaned, his look far-off.
I rounded the side of the house, leaving him
to bleed while I shook by the flower garden.

Later, I tore down all my plastic pennants
and fell asleep on the floor with the light on.
Summer ended that year in the middle of June.

"What is it?" my wife asks, squinting at the sketch.
And I tell her about how, when I was much younger,
I could sleep anywhere—under the copper beech,

or on the itchy red mat in my parents' foyer—
if I lay on one side and brought my knees up
the way kids do, not meaning to forget.