Truth-Taking Stare
04/28/2026 14:58h
... in which generally the patient has the sense of having lost contact with things, or of everything having undergone a subtle but all-encompassing change, reality revealed as never before, though eerie in some ineffable way.
—Louis Sass
Or gallery. Or strange askew museum. Or painting of a hotel bed
with some cheap print above the headboard. (Palm tree or a sleigh
pulling Xmas trees.) Or the day two-dimensional, subzero
as I run the beach along the frozen lake. The waves
lathed to Hokusai spirals. Cold gallery, every inch
of wall space covered, park benches derbied by snow.
House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. House for battered women.
House of the servants of His Godhead Reverend Moon
Who plots in some Seoul penthouse His glorious
death and resurrection. Ten minutes ago I left you
to the laying on of hands. Maria talking fast in glottal
Polish, and the physical therapist, hugely blonde,
lifting your legs, white cocoons of the casts. First up,
then to the sides, the hospital bed in the living room
hulking, whirring as it moves along with you.
To talk of this and you directly, though I can’t.
To heal you with my own hands though I can’t.
Legs not working, hands not working, tongue encased in plaster.
The tongue going numb with the hands. Why my friend Dave
loves jazz: to hammer and obliterate the words,
nullify too the wordlessness. “Blue Train” on my Walkman
as the Moonies leave from house to van, lugging crates
of silken flowers. Blue pills that didn’t work.
Then my month of yellow pills. To not metamorphose
to my father writhing as the charges surge
from temples down the spine, a dog’s twitching legs
in sleep. To mollify with acronyms: ECT, Odysseuses
and Tristans of PDR, yellow Prozac, sky blue Zoloft.
To heal you with my own hands though I can’t.
The day two-dimensional. (Past and present and to dwell
in neither.) Truth-taking stare. Height and width,
no depth. On a screen the paramedics ease you
from car to ambulance, having labored with a crowbar
at the door, and I push again through the crowd
on Thorndale.This is my husband. Please
let him come with me.