Hepatitis C

It’s a new disease, meaning some
microscope found it out ten years ago
and added it to its sisters, A and B,
long renowned for fear and loathing.

It showed up after a needle-stick
Annie suffered at work, but who can tell.
It might have been simmering forty years
from her childhood anemia transfusions.

Here it is anyway, transforming her blood
just enough to be seen. All else is tame.
It might remain so all her life.
Or it might creep. Or rage.

It wears evil’s mystery well for so young
a disease: we can’t predict it or cure it
but now we know it’s here. It loves
the liver and can’t wait to take that red meat

down new trails of sacrifice. (Unless,
as I said, it doesn’t.) When (if) it starts
though, it will move by the most
infinitesimal steps: tiny crow’s feet

by the eyes, networks of fragile
varicosities on her cheeks, a slowing
step of energy indistinguishable
for months—or years—from aging itself.

The symptoms, in short, are subtle
in the extreme and will require the most
careful attention, or inattention,
the strain of which is identical.