How Does Love Enter the Body?

In all our years together, chicken soup
has never once been on the menu.
But the oncologist said nutrition,
said make it palatable. So I Google recipes
 
on your first day of chemo, as your Power Port—
so new the incision still puckers
under its Dermabond glaze—
waits like a docking station.
 
The nurse guides a needle into the port
and starts the flow, a killer cocktail
of FOLFOX 6, Oxaliplatin, and Avastin 
streaming into the Vena Cava,
 
and from there, the headquarters,
your heart. Back home with a portable pump,
slow poison drips two days and nights. While you sleep,
I incant my own magic into a soup pot:
 
Ragged shreds of chicken torn
from the bone, ribbed celery, for the strength
of green sinews,  carrots, unscraped,
clinging bits of good earth, plump egg noodles,
 
firm and chewy as love’s tongue. Thyme,
from the Greek Thymus, for courage,
and bay leaves—a laurel wreath of victory—
all steeped in a primordial brew.
 
I long to hijack the port, mainline soup
straight to the vein, but my cure must simmer
and seep before finding communion
in the vessels of your blood.
 
How does love enter the body?
In streams and rivulets
of drug and broth, a river mingling
with your ocean’s moon-guided tide,
 
each whooshing wave a mystic elixir
transmuting heart’s dark muscle, that thrumming
pump, into a gold perennial curled beneath
the cold, waiting for its cue to bloom.