Though we have bailed out of exercise early
today—because the leaf blower man has
come to blow away the leaves on her lawn
where we work out to and with the oldies—

Marilyn comes inside, heading for her laptop
on the table by the living room window.
I sigh, seeing her there, this longtime writer,
her manicured red nails hovering over the keys,

her short-circuited brain recovering
day by day, week by week, watching her
return to herself, to those who love her,
to the world that she has chronicled

since she could first hold a pencil,
on countless pages, in journals
on paper and pixels, in many books.
And now she sits on the sofa reading

a memoir on her iPad by a woman who,
after concussion, had trouble reading.
Why can’t you read? the author asks herself.
You were in the Acorn group in second grade.

“I didn’t have any trouble reading,” Marilyn
says. “That would have been awful.”
She chats as she did in the before-stroke
times, better able to follow conversation,

though I still need to slow my speech
for her to catch my fastball words. I think
of her late husband’s dementia that utterly
destroyed his brain, her own on the mend.

Every time I’m with her, I find her more
herself, but, I suspect, she was never
not herself. No one can see the buttery
consistency of her brain floating

in its cradle of fluid, doing its good work
to repair itself bit by bit, synapses
making new connections, her brain
circuitry rewiring synapse to synapse,

creating new pathways,
one precious cell talking to another,
all by their clever, clever selves.