160 Illness poems

She awoke to find her fishtail clean gone but in the bed with her were two long, cold thingammies. You'd have thought they were tangles of kelp or collops of ham. "They're no doubt taking the piss, it being New Year's Eve. Half the staff legless with drink and the other half playing pranks. Still, this is taking it a bit far." And with that she hurled the two thingammies out of the room. But here's the thing she still doesn't get— why she tumbled out after them arse-over-tip... How she was connected to those two thingammies and how they were connected to her. It was the sister who gave her the wink and let her know what was what. "You have one leg attached to you there and another one underneath that. One leg, two legs... A-one and a-two... Now you have to learn what they can do." In the long months that followed, I wonder if her heart fell the way her arches fell, her instep arches.

We start stopping when she’s afraid something bad will happen. Don’t worry, I say, all will be well. How could she know? She’s never read it, never heard of Elizabeth and Jane, never wanted Mr. Darcy. Like me she needs to know how things will end. I know Elizabeth will be fine. As I knew, last week, my sister weeping, that Elinor– sobbing, begging–wouldn’t lose Marianne. It’s Jane Austen! My sister doesn’t know that in Austen nothing really bad happens. I leave her on the couch with the last hours. How much my sister will have to endure, alone, with this new drama. Later her message. The last one in which she will sound like herself. Hi, it’s me. The movie was unbelievable. Unbelievable.

Maybe my soul is straight and good, but she’s got to lug my heart, my blood, which all hurts because it’s crooked; its weight sends her staggering. She has no bed, she has no home, she merely hangs on my sharp bones, flapping her terrible wings. And my hands are completely shot, shriveled, worn: here, take a look at how they clammily, clumsily hop like rain-crazed toads. As for all the other stuff, it’s all used up and sad and old— why doesn’t God haul me out to the muck and let me drop. Is it because of my mug with its frowning mouth? So often I would itch to be luminous and free of fog but nothing would approach except big dogs. And the dogs got zilch.

Praise the restless beds Praise the beds that do not adjust that won't lift the head to feed or lower for shots or blood or raise to watch the tinny TV Praise the hotel TV that won't quit its murmur & holler Praise the room service that doesn't exist just the slow delivery to the front desk of cooling pizzas & brown bags leaky greasy & clear Praise the vending machines Praise the change Praise the hot water & the heat or the loud cool that helps the helpless sleep. Praise the front desk who knows to wake Rm 120 when the hospital rings Praise the silent phone Praise the dark drawn by thick daytime curtains after long nights of waiting, awake. Praise the waiting & then praise the nothing that's better than bad news Praise the wakeup call at 6 am Praise the sleeping in Praise the card hung on the door like a whisper lips pressed silent Praise the stranger's hands that change the sweat of sheets Praise the checking out Praise the going home to beds unmade for days Beds that won't resurrect or rise that lie there like a child should sleeping, tubeless Praise this mess that can be left

This night nurse is different. She walks into my room and does not turn the light on. She thinks I am sleeping. I have just barely opened my left eye, am looking through the slightest slit, as moonlight exposes the room for what it really is — a collection of surfaces; lines and planes, mostly. The night nurse puts a foot up on the radiator and braces her clipboard on her knee as she appears to take down a few notes. I imagine she is working on a sonnet, and that her ankle looks like polished walnut. You imagine she is working on a crossword, and that her feet are killing her. The slightest slit is like an old gate at a Japanese tea garden at night, in the rain, that is supposed to be closed, that is supposed to be locked. “Someone has locked up poorly,” you’d say. “Incorrectly.” But no one has asked you.

1. Living from pill to pill, from bed to couch, what doesn’t kill me only makes me dizzy. Pain dissolves like chalk in water, grit on the bottom of the glass. Waiting takes forever, throbs to the soles of my feet,Bella noche . . . Hives as large as mice hump up under my skin (“no more barbiturates for you, Cynthia!”) —itch, stretch, I don’t fit my flesh— sting, tingle, prick, the sorcerer’s threat. There’s a knife stabbed through my left eye. My right foot is made of elephant hide and weighs in at roughly one cartload of potatoes. Oxygen twenty-four hours; I’m swelled with steroids, prednisone buzz in the brain; a motel room with sixteen foreign workers sleeping in shifts, playing reggae at three a.m. 2. Oh I love my white pill that makes the black fist of pain unclench, unspasming the nerves. I float, released to darkness visible, worlds dissolving. And the yellow pill, bitter on my tongue, that wakes me at 2 a.m. writing out plans in Arabic to organize an expedition to the Pole. Drug of hubris searing my eyes, my scrawl unreadable in daylight: foil my enemies. Bitter taste of fugue, my hand shakes: some foreign being in my brain giving orders. You must You must You will. Later, the pungent brown liquor shoots the dark with threads of gold behind my eyes. One flash as the mind goes out. 3. I must elude pain float past clarity pain in the brain slammed down like a housefly. It’s a big dodge. Fly on a stovetop sizzle and ash pop. This is illusion, mental confusion born in the synapse. What can be undone down to the last gasp. It’s a hodgepodge. If you kill pain you will become pain; pain does not feel pain, no nerves in the brain. It’s a mind-fuck. It’s just your bad luck. A torpor sealed my brain I felt no humans near it seemed to me I could not feel or touch or see or hear. I don’t know who I am without my medicine. My skin will crawl with bugs if I don’t get my drugs. My brain’s a maelstrom, singing a sad song. Reality is so cruel. Prednisone oh prednisone so fast my mind racing, never tasting rest. Razzle-dazzle razz Fist bitch piss stitch witch . . . (only wait, the fit will pass.) fast, gash, lash, splash—QUIT! (I saw a werewolf in a white suit, walking past the tables at the Full Moon Café. Floppy bow tie, big furry hands.) Percodan, Percocet, let you go, let you rest. When the grip lets you go and you float like a note on the flow, there’s your life, there’s no worry— (yeah, it’s funky how the night moves.) Barbiturate babykins, narcotic slut, black oil of opiate. Chatty Cathy, dirty brat, bed-wetter, nasty pants. Painkiller, painkiller, I have a new friend, better than my old friend, plugging holes in the brain: Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud, Cocaine! I want a soft landing; let me float. Once the seizure lifted me and threw me down. I did not like it. I did not like lying there on the floor looking up through air like green water. 4. And there is one so dark, a ghost, it passes through the mesh of thought without tearing a strand, whispering destinies perceived true, pronouncing sentences of death. 5. A cloud, the absence of a noun, no name, roaring far away in the summer dark like a train, or a giant fan, or a highway that never stops. The mind explodes in the dark of space, unnursed by atmospheres, as air raid sirens scream for blood and I am only nerves, strung on constellations, meridians and vectors quivering. A red and yellow capsule invades the chemistry of thought; cathode rays blast from the television screen and signals pass deep into space until the stars are singing “Rosalita.” You will not remember this night.

For Stanley Plumly Then the breakers turning back to brightness, if the light’s opaque ocean-blue sameness in the sky can be said to break, the way the waves themselves, blue in back of blue like a color in the eye, fall back to the wall — sea wrack, driftwood, or the inner optic shelf behind the lens. Then the gulls and simple cirrus strands turn back to light. Then to inland sparrows, drifting under blue Ohio’s sky — it’s a work day and the heat is the heat of the color of your clothes, wash day, and hands hurt from the swinging of a scythe. Then it’s day into night at the heart of the seeds that fell from your hands breaking open, strewn in rows like water along the ancient seabed floor of the farm. Someone is standing at the door. Someone is waving from the car. This day and that one sinking to brightness and the blue evening wall before that, and a seed that fell from a star becoming, as you will say, one day, all we will become.

note: Most of this journal, written on shipboard, seems to have been destroyed, probably by fire. What remains suggests that Mrs. Chandler journeyed to New Orleans without her husband's permission, thus becoming indirectly the cause of her baby's death. August, 1849                      EN ROUTE FROM NEW YORK TO NEW ORLEANS ABOARD THE 'GENERAL WAYNE' Two weeks aboard the 'General Wayne' is little more than a floating hospital vomiting spells. I attribute them to is truly ill. For two days he has in his bunk. Belle seems to recover. At least fretful which indicates improvement. struck by a nervous disorder. I sleep very little and take no solid food. (page torn) (Second page) Yesterday evening poor little Cookie died. She was seized suddenly with spasms, poor thing, and died in an hour. You will accuse me of but it was truly frightful. I have not slept for weeping. only a dog! (page torn) (Third page) arrived safely in New Orleans but embark. We are all in quarantine might be better, but Belle is all day by her bedside. Doctor plague and gives me no hope pray for survival. (page torn) (Fourth page) have not been able to put pen to all over. Our dear little girl among the blessed, my beautiful authorities let no one near. darkies. I am full of one who was without fault and so, lies shrouded in my sister's blame God and myself, dear why you have left me without support? (page torn)

An erasure of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Palingenesis” I, sobbing in the rolling mist, Started for peopled days. In dreams A faded, lonely promontory shed petals. Belief exists. Cunning with its perfume Working from youth, defiance. A phantom Vanished. The swift surrenders, leap into The old dead heart of lies. I will give, remembering my turns Into foliage. Of what light unseen! What, what, what, what, what, what Will hold still without its end?

Our sorrow had neither place nor carrier-away, and dared not hover over the child whose breath opened as transom of a frail house. Nor could we put our sorrow in the dictionary, for ghastliness already shot out its own defining in rags of fired light. Pigeons would not sleek it over their dirty coats, nor fly sorrow against the aviary's sharp fence. Each day bridgeless, each night birdless, all the nocturnals needless at the expanse of our nightwatch. But wake at the moon, we could, mumbling,are we in a horror show?—inside of sleep our shock-white minds caught on reels where a child's body breaks the heart and the mother can't know if she counts as a mother. I don't know if the child heard what wept at the bedside, orderlies snapping smelling salts from chalky bullets against all the mothers falling, all the fathers under what each branch let down: there's a hidden weight to snow.