Elizabeth Arnold

capable of feeling while in contact with another? I look at the red-tiled roofs outside, at all the angles facing the white-blue cloudless sky like the creases in Bellini’s angel’s silver-blue dress, Tintoretto’s white one that’s practically transparent in his Annunciazione at the San Rocco — cloth complex as thought! Then the bells start, flood the void.

I said no to you so often, couldn't see. Do you know how that changed you —divided what you saw in me or anything (if you did) from what you said or mostly didn't? And another bottle drained, your head lolling off the chair's back, the mirror's face blacked.

If they'd had writing in time, Cuba could have been Crete, watery source of the Minoans and thus the Greeks. What's lost? A possible us growing like new foliage out of stony ground, emerging? Last voice, first, a whole world calling— awful, inaudible —into the unstoppable loud (roaring!) hurricane-force sea wind.

What appear to be peach-white, over-washed pajamas in the washed-out newspaper photo on one side droop like a monk’s hood, the upper half of that leg raised with the other, whole one and the hands they’re there! and the less washed-out pink balloon above them that they reach for or have just let go —the latter probably as one hand, palm up, is wide of it, two-thirds of a laughing mouth visible, the wheelchair in this case, its sparkle stark against the flannel and plied living limbs within it, a tool of fun. Such wisdom’s possible here only, the ability to feel glad to be alive gone on the outside, the “cloistered incarceration” of the ward holding the boys as if they were a group of monks. Asked by a visitor what it’s like to live secluded most of the time, mute and with forced labor, a chronic lack of sleep for all the praying, the Benedictine monk asked back: “Have you ever been in love?”

They told me there’d be pain so when I felt it, sitting at my beat-up farm desk that looks out glass doors onto the browning garden—plain sparrows bathing in the cube-shaped fountain so violently they drain it, the white-throats with their wobbly two-note song on the long way south still, and our dogs out like lights and almost falling off their chairs freed of the real-time for awhile as time began for me to swell, slow down, carry me out of all this almost to a where about as strong a lure as love.

So lightly and invisibly I hardly knew it, river of blood descending without joy back to the heart through the frail vein all the time —the largest of the body!— shredded then dissolved ("obliterated") and there was a sudden seepage into surrounding tissue instead of the blood pouring out as you'd expect forever, and a new vein formed to bypass what was gone like a wild meander even the smallest flood ends, and the river goes straight from that point. But in my case the thin-walled base-ends held forming an anabranch, a section of a river that diverts from the main channel, rejoins it downstream. Local ones can be caused by or make small islands in the watercourse but sometimes they flow hundreds of miles like the Bahr el Zeraf in the south Sudan that splits from the Bahr al Jabal of the White Nile, doesn't return until Malakal instead of leaving behind, as it could have with the blood being old, a full-fledged oxbow lake that before too long will blister in the sun, become a little blue scar beside the heart.