Diabetes

I’m drawing blood the night of the full moon,
also a full eclipse of the full moon.
When will this happen again in my life,
if ever? Maybe in yours, of course.
I’m drawing blood not in Vampirism
but in diabetes. Few can find the Carpathians
on the map. It would be unhealthy for a vampire
to drink my sugary blood, which is a river
miles in length, a rare round river,
billions of round rivers walking the earth
and flowing with blood. A needle pops
the finger and out it comes, always a surprise,
red as a rose rose red my heart pumps flower red.
You wonder who created this juice of life?
And what power in the blood, as the hymn goes.
The grizzly flips the huge dead buffalo like a pancake.
The bloody brain concocts its mysteries, Kennedy’s
fragments flying forever through the air in our neurons.
Walking outside with a bloody smear on my tingling
finger I stare at the half-shadowed bloodless
moon. Fifty yards away in September wolves killed
three of Bob Weber’s sheep. My wife Linda called
me in Paris to say that from our bedroom window
before dawn you could hear them eating the sheep.
Red blood on the beige grass of late September.