160 Illness poems

The wild winds weep, And the night is a-cold; Come hither, Sleep, And my griefs infold: But lo! the morning peeps Over the eastern steeps, And the rustling birds of dawn The earth do scorn. Lo! to the vault Of paved heaven, With sorrow fraught My notes are driven: They strike the ear of night, Make weep the eyes of day; They make mad the roaring winds, And with tempests play. Like a fiend in a cloud With howling woe, After night I do croud, And with night will go; I turn my back to the east, From whence comforts have increas'd; For light doth seize my brain With frantic pain.

They say you can jinx a poem if you talk about it before it is done. If you let it out too early, they warn, your poem will fly away, and this time they are absolutely right. Take the night I mentioned to you I wanted to write about the madmen, as the newspapers so blithely call them, who attack art, not in reviews, but with breadknives and hammers in the quiet museums of Prague and Amsterdam. Actually, they are the real artists, you said, spinning the ice in your glass. The screwdriver is their brush. The real vandals are the restorers, you went on, slowly turning me upside-down, the ones in the white doctor's smocks who close the wound in the landscape, and thus ruin the true art of the mad. I watched my poem fly down to the front of the bar and hover there until the next customer walked in— then I watched it fly out the open door into the night and sail away, I could only imagine, over the dark tenements of the city. All I had wished to say was that art was also short, as a razor can teach with a slash or two, that it only seems long compared to life, but that night, I drove home alone with nothing swinging in the cage of my heart except the faint hope that I might catch a glimpse of the thing in the fan of my headlights, maybe perched on a road sign or a street lamp, poor unwritten bird, its wings folded, staring down at me with tiny illuminated eyes.

Yes, a chalice: held up high As if it were an elixir instead of dead-leaf soup. But peek out with your watery eye. That's right: over the lip of the thing you're in. An opera house can smell like iron, cologne. Aesthetes and snoozers a thrill Mired under chandeliers, but Can thrills be mired? Of course! And smells Can make you sad, even When they're clouding up the hall near midnight, And everyone is clapping, clapping. The audience stinks of aging privilege. A chalice that might have held a Eucharist, Or a swimmer made of kissable puddles, But instead it holds you With your impulses which molder—O What do you know, Unreason fornicating with itself? You get heavier when I plea. Are you nothing but chemistry With a sick sense of humor? Willy-nilly chemicals elope! But why bother to marry When all they have to do is fuck My mind and make you justice of the peace? Are there no annulments in the offing? You are not so interesting. You care too much, or not enough. Inhale bad breath from the row behind. Sniff back what Spilleth, spilleth as if from a nose. (Do Renaissance verbs turn you quaint?) Nettles on your funk-wet wings. You're greedy To escape from and into The vowel in the tenor's mouth. His costume could have stench of urine. For God's sake don't pour yourself. Think: clear pond. Think: man at river's edge Who knows the difference Between desecration and redemption.

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

The first commotion stirred him to offend, forgivably, with friendly leaps and clutching; but soon too urgent friendliness was wrought by a new wave of guests. At last I complained to that one man that it was indecent of him to tempt the beast so, pressing his tweed knee against the furry brisket. But he smiled, and spoke with a Rhinelandish accent: Milady, your youth, as mine did me, tends you now to the younger beliefs of men, their naive symbols: cloudy animal heads to represent witless rampages of glands. Egyptian Hershef, Seth, Ra—the romance of anonymity above the neck and smooth humanity below—were gods of early hankering and youthful conscience. See how the shaggy thing turns back his ears; the straining mouth and eyes’ protuberance leave me my steady vision and clear speech and mind. The aegipans, surely the centaurs are truer concepts of the dual beast and a maturer Hellas sculpted them: potentially ironic man above and hairy vitality below the waist. No one, Milady, no lover on earth does other than what I am doing now, methodically tempting the brute, till from the dim sheath an eager lick of flame darts forth.

I wake up cold, I who Prospered through dreams of heat Wake to their residue, Sweat, and a clinging sheet. My flesh was its own shield: Where it was gashed, it healed. I grew as I explored The body I could trust Even while I adored The risk that made robust, A world of wonders in Each challenge to the skin. I cannot but be sorry The given shield was cracked, My mind reduced to hurry, My flesh reduced and wrecked. I have to change the bed, But catch myself instead Stopped upright where I am Hugging my body to me As if to shield it from The pains that will go through me, As if hands were enough To hold an avalanche off.

For Phil Jackson The gym opened out before us like a vast arena, the bleached floorboards yawned toward a vanishing point, staggered seats high as the Mayan temple I once saw devoured by vines. Each of us was eaten up inside — all citizens of   lost and unmapped cities. Frank hugged the pimply ball over his belly like an unborn child. Claire dressed for daycare in daffodil yellow and jelly shoes. David’s gaze was an emperor’s surveying a desiccated battlefield. Since he viewed everything that way, we all saw him the same. The psych techs in Cloroxed white were giant angels who set us running drills, at which we sucked. The zones we set out to defend were watery at every edge. We missed close chest passes, easy combos. Our metronomes run different tempos, John proclaimed. Then Claire started seeing dashes stutter through the air behind the ball. Then speed lines on our backs, and then her own head went wobbly as a spinning egg. She’d once tracked planetary orbits for NASA and now sat sidelined by her eyes’ projections. Only Bill had game. Catatonic Bill whose normal talent was to schlub days in a tub chair — his pudding face scarred with chicken pox — using his hand for an ashtray, belly for an armrest. Now all that peeled away, and he emerged, clean as an egg. He was a lithe and licorice boy, eeling past all comers, each shot sheer net. He faked both ways, went left. Beneath the orange rim his midair pirouettes defied the gravity that I could barely sludge through. He scored beyond what even Claire could count, then he bent panting, hands on knees as the orderlies held out water cups, and the rest of us reached to pat his back or slap his sweaty hand, no one minding about the stench or his breath like old pennies. Then as quick as that he went. Inside his head some inner winch did reel him back from the front of   his face bones where he’d been ablaze. He went back and back into that shadowed stare. Lucky we were to breathe his air. Breath is God’s intent to keep us living. He was the self   I’d come in wanting to kill, and I left him there.

It’s not that I don’t like the hospital. Those small bouquets of flowers, pert and brave. The smell of antiseptic cleansers. The ill, so wistful in their rooms, so true. My friend, the one who’s dying, took me out To where the patients go to smoke, IV’s And oxygen in tanks attached to them— A tiny patio for skeletons. We shared A cigarette, which was delicious but Too brief. I held his hand; it felt Like someone’s keys. How beautiful it was, The sunlight pointing down at us, as if We were important, full of life, unbound. I wandered for a moment where his ribs Had made a space for me, and there, beside The thundering waterfall of his heart, I rubbed my eyes and thought, “I’m lost.”

As the doors glide shut behind me, the world flares back into being— I exist again, recover myself, sunlight undimmed by dark panes, the heat on my arms the earth’s breath. The wind tongues me to my feet like a doe licking clean her newborn fawn. At my back, days measured by vital signs, my mouth opened and arm extended, the nighttime cries of a man withered child-size by cancer, and the bells of emptied IVs tolling through hallways. Before me, life—mysterious, ordinary— holding off pain with its muscular wings. As I step to the curb, an orange moth dives into the basket of roses that lately stood on my sickroom table, and the petals yield to its persistent nudge, opening manifold and golden.

In one corner of the ward somebody was eating a raw chicken. The cheerful nurses did not see. With the tube down my throat I could not tell them. Nor did they notice the horror show on the TV set suspended over my windowless bed. The screen was dead but a torn face was clear. I did not see my own in a mirror for weeks. When it happened, when I dared to face my face after the ravaging, it was not mine but something whittled, honed down to a sly resemblance. It, even the mirror, the pale room, the oxygen tank neat and black as a bomb in its portable crate— all was hallucination. But the bloody rooster, the stray pieces of bodies slung into dreamless nooks, the white-haired doll whimpering on a gift counter— those were real. I keep living there. Foolish. I am home. Half safe.