Stroke

Stroke
  by Heather McHugh

The literate are ill-prepared for this
snap in the line of life:
the day turns a trick
of twisted tongues and is
untiable, the month by no mere root
moon-ridden, and the yearly eloquences yielding more
than summer's part of speech times four. We better learn

the buried meaning in the grave. here:
all we see of its alphabet is tracks
of predators, all we know of its tense
the slow seconds and quick centuries
of sex. Unletter the past and then
the future comes to terms. One late fall day
I stumbled from the study and I found
the easy symbols of the living room revised:

my shocked senses flocked to the window's reference
where now all backyard attitudes were deep
in memory: the landscapes I had known too well-
the picnic table and the hoe, the tricycle, the stubborn
shrub-the home grown syllables
of shapely living all-

lay sanded and camelled by foreign snow...

Five years ago, I sat all day, waiting for the light paralysis in my right arm and leg to pass. The previous October I had experienced my first TIA (transient ischemic attack), which sent me to the doctor. She concluded that it had most likely been a TIA and sent me home. No big deal, no medication, no follow-up.
I assumed I was having another one and it, too, would pass. I went to bed thinking I would wake up feeling fine.

I did not.