Ponce was on to something. The magic of youth.
Though South Florida, it turns out, not the place to search.

My love, whom the world needs more than it needs me,
needs a bone marrow transplant—the collection of stem cells
from her blood for re-introduction after extreme chemo.
They are looking for the youngest cells, the uncorrupted.

But on Tuesday, her count of these, per the hemocytometer,
is six, too low to even start the process. Twenty-five,
they say, is the goal, forty would be fabulous.
They will search again Wednesday.
A Filipino nurse named Teo tells her as she leaves
that the young cells will come out of hiding
if someone rubs the arches of her feet.

Which someone will be me that evening,
after I research the concept like the scientist I am,
discovering it to be ridiculous even by Internet standards,
where endorsed stimulants include sweet potatoes
and weightlifting but nothing remotely podiatric. Still,
I do like her feet. Midwestern. Optimistic. True.

We start out a bit confused. Did he mean rub or massage?
Top, side or bottom? I show her a plastic card,
correlating regions of the sole to internal organs,
that a coed-turned shaman gave me in the ’60’s,
after we shared an interesting night.
My love is not convinced,
though while pressing and squeezing for a full forty minutes,
I can’t resist some attention to the base of her pinky toes,
which apparently commune with her earlobes.
She asks if chatting would break my concentration.

Wednesday morning the only number that means something
isn’t the Dow or how many runs the Giants scored.
It’s seventy-nine.

Who knew that at my age I could do anything
to interest the young. Who knew how ready I had become
to abandon science and play the goddam Pied Piper.
I see all those bright cells texting each other as they leave
the comfort of the marrow for what my fingers have promised
will be the role of their lives.