Mark O'Brien

I tell my attendants, Right there, When they rub me where it itches. They rub for a few seconds, then move on, There’s so much of it to wash, “It” being me, a former person, Now something that must be washed every day In so little time. Fifty minutes outside my breathing machine, And all I can do is stare As my breath recedes like the woman Who would not love me. It’s almost over, I say over and over to myself As soon as the machine is turned off. An idiotic mantra perhaps, But it helps when the ache descends into my eyes And my words quit coming out right. Left hand, I say. Right foot? the attendant says, guessing. I begin to fantasize about gusts of air Rushing down my windpipe with hurricane force. Garish and impossible, they’re respiratory porn. My re-entry is stalled By the attendant straightening a sheet That no one will see. Enraged, I squeeze my eyes closed. Christ. “What?” Never mind. Once back in and turned on, I cough violently and with conviction. Shocked by the force of the inrushing air, I feel my lungs expand like birthday balloons, My terror-flattened mind pops up into 3-D, As I return to the land of breathing. January, 1990

I scream The body electric, This yellow, metal, pulsing cylinder Whooshing all day, all night In its repetitive dumb mechanical rhythm. Rudely, it inserts itself in the map of my body, Which my midnight mind, Dream-drenched cartographer of terra incognita, Draws upon the dark parchment of sleep. I scream In my body electric; A dream snake bites my left leg. Indignant, I shake the gods by their abrupt shoulders, Demanding to know how such a vile slitherer Could enter my serene metal shell. The snake is punished with death, The specialty of the gods. Clamp-jawed still in my leg, It must be removed; The dream of the snake Must be removed, While I am restored By Consciousness, that cruelest of gods, In metal hard reluctance To my limited, awkward, déclasé Body electric, As it whispers promises of health, Whooshes beautiful lies of invulnerability, Sighs sibilantly, seraphically, relentlessly: It is me, It is me. March, 1988

Lonnie didn’t want to eat with Clifford. I tried to keep my eyes away from his mouth, Which opened uncontrollably, His thick saliva oozing over him. And he couldn’t talk. So I ate my lunch with Lonnie, heard him talk About the dive which broke his neck, about His motorcycle shop in Chico, while Another nurse gave Clifford lunch. Every day His parents came to push his chair around The grounds. A grim, determined pair; I wondered what disasters they had seen. The nurses talked with them about Their son. His eyes are beautiful, they said. One day a nurse who put her stethoscope To Clifford’s chest could not detect a beat. “His heart has stopped,” she said in quiet awe. The P.A. speakers cried: CODE BLUE, C-2, STAT! CODE BLUE, C-2, STAT! The doctors, nurses and technicians ran Into our crowded room. The squeaking Crash cart could not be heard above The urgent, human sounds the doctors made: A swirl of orders filled the air. “I need The mallet quick, goddamnit, QUICK, I said!” Encapsulated in my iron lung, I noted that doctors weren’t the calm Professionals portrayed by Robert Young And Richard Chamberlain, but people just As scared of death as everybody else. Then, they took me, iron lung and all, And parked me in a room Where women patients spend their lives. The room was quiet as a stone; no clocks Or television sets marked the time, Which passed as slowly as Moses climbing Mount Sinai, Until the social worker, Mrs. Mintzer, Came to talk to me about Shakespeare. All his tragedies, She said, contain a point where things begin To fall apart. The bold protagonist, No matter what his cunning, skill or strength, Can see his fall foreshadowed by a small Event. Macbeth saw Banquo at the feast And after that it went from bad to worse Until the murd’rous thane became a corpse Without a head. She paused to think a while. Now Clifford led a fairly normal life, She pointed out, despite his cerebral palsy. Playing cards and camping with his family Were not beyond his reach. The point where things fell apart occurred Five years ago, when he fell and broke His shoulder bone. “Clifford died,” she said. And tried to comfort me with her sympathy For my awful loss. I didn’t mourn his death at all. “Too bad he died so young,” I said, At twenty-three.” But all I cared about Was the space in my crowded room. The p.m. nurses took me back into my room. I asked one to play my tape, Appalachian Spring. She reached into my bedside stand and slipped. “There’s blood all over the floor, Clifford’s. I thought they’d cleaned up all that mess.” I spent the weekend after that in the solarium. I read and overheard the nurses in the next room. “They say he wrote exquisite poetry About the way he felt when people stared At him as if he were a freak.” And so I learned of my insensitivity, Insensitivity so great I failed To recognize a person Caught in much the same predicament as I. Such numbness isolates me more Than any iron lung.

Grasping for straws is easier; You can see the straws. “This most excellent canopy, the air, look you,” Presses down upon me At fifteen pounds per square inch, A dense, heavy, blue-glowing ocean, Supporting the weight of condors That swim its churning currents. All I get is a thin stream of it, A finger’s width of the rope that ties me to life As I labor like a stevedore to keep the connection. Water wouldn’t be so circumspect; Water would crash in like a drunken sailor, But air is prissy and genteel, Teasing me with its nearness and pervading immensity. The vast, circumambient atmosphere Allows me but ninety cubic centimeters Of its billions of gallons and miles of sky. I inhale it anyway, Knowing that it will hurt In the weary ends of my crumpled paper bag lungs. July, 1988