160 Illness poems

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.

Work out. Ten laps. Chin ups. Look good. Steam room. Dress warm. Call home. Fresh air. Eat right. Rest well. Sweetheart. Safe sex. Sore throat. Long flu. Hard nodes. Beware. Test blood. Count cells. Reds thin. Whites low. Dress warm. Eat well. Short breath. Fatigue. Night sweats. Dry cough. Loose stools. Weight loss. Get mad. Fight back. Call home. Rest well. Don't cry. Take charge. No sex. Eat right. Call home. Talk slow. Chin up. No air. Arms wide. Nodes hard. Cough dry. Hold on. Mouth wide. Drink this. Breathe in. Breathe out. No air. Breathe in. Breathe in. No air. Black out. White rooms. Head hot. Feet cold. No work. Eat right. CAT scan. Chin up. Breathe in. Breathe out. No air. No air. Thin blood. Sore lungs. Mouth dry. Mind gone. Six months? Three weeks? Can't eat. No air. Today? Tonight? It waits. For me. Sweet heart. Don't stop. Breathe in. Breathe out.

while he lives here’s a list of images light in a filthy glass pigeon dead on the high spiked window clear plastic bag above him full of water if water could kill everything that lives in you & it can — i sit in a corner of the cancer ward fingering the app that shows me other faggots in this hospital chat with one i might meet in radiology but don’t       instead make the sick man laugh while he’s conscious compliment his gown his new brutal cheekbones that appeared with the chemo if only it were simple as a magnet sucking the bad metals out of him if only i could make a better list more magic      less language periphrastic & restorative if only i met that stranger in the basement & our pleasure rose through the hospital bliss poultice for the sorrow-skinned who sit half-conscious & half-machinery while the sick man lives all i can do is recount the vast pastoral of his illness when he is gone i’m counting on all the good flooding back his beard a collapsed country i’ll refuge inside his laugh a memory so liquid i’ll hear it when anyone opens a window to scare the birds

With a boil the size of an egg protruding from her right hip, she knows what I must do, and to stall me has locked herself inside the bathroom, bargaining for a way out. But it’s too late: I’ve seen the oozing wounds stopped up with bits of toilet paper and tape, the scarified pockets that crater the surface of her arms, buttocks, thighs. A mean fix torched her last vein years ago, and she’s been banging the dope ever since, puncturing her body like a juju doll. She wants to kick, but not now. I’m not gonna lie to you, she says in a velvet voice. I already know what she’s after: something stronger than local, a few Percocet, a shot of Demerol before she’ll let me begin. All I can tell you is, when the abscess finally drains the odor is so foul it’s evil. And I’m not sure, driving home later that night, still smelling the pallid citrus, whether it’s merely hallucination, the way her memory inhabits me; or if being in that same room, inhaling that same air, made some of her part of me. And whose veins are these, beginning to twitch?

1 Nowhere is all around us, pressureless, A vacuum waiting for a rupture in The tegument, a puncture in the skin, To pass inside without a password and Implode us into Erewhon. This room Is dangerously unguarded: in one wall An empty elevator clangs its doors, Imperiously, for fodder; in the hall, Bare stretchers gape for commerce; in the air Outside, a trembling, empty brightness falls In hunger on those whom it would devour Like any sparrow hawk as darkness falls And rises silently up the steel stairs To the eleventh and last floor, where I Reside on sufferance of authorities Until my visas wither, and I die. 2 Where is my friend, Rodonda Morton Schiff, Whose hulk breasts, cygnet-like, the Totensee, Shrilling her bosun’s whistles, piping Death— The Almirante of the Doldrums in His black cocked hat and braided cape—aboard Her scuttling vessel with such poems as just Escape confounding his gaunt rape with lust? She should be singing my song at this hour. 3 It is a simple matter to be brave In facing a black screen with a white FIN— The final title—fading out as all Credits have faded in the final crawl, To which the audience has turned its back And mumbled, shuffled, struggled into coats On its way out to face a different night; It is far harder, in the light of day, Surrounded by striped student nurses, to Endure a slight procedure in which you Are the anatomy lesson in pink paint Splashed by some master on the tinctured air, Complete, in gross detail, to the grimace Denoted by a squiggle on your face As the bone-marrow needle sinks its fang Through atomies of drugged and dullard skin And subcutaneum to pierce the thin, Tough eggshell of the pelvic arch, wherein— After steam-hammer pressure—it will suck Up sips of specimen tissue with a pain Akin to an extraction under gas, All gravity against all hollowness. Affronted and affrighted, I can’t pass This episode in silent dignity Or bloodless banter; I must sweat and grunt And moan in corporal fear of corporal pain Too venial to be mortal, making a fool Of my lay figure in its textbook pose (Fig. 1) before these starched and giggling girls Too young to be let out of simpering school To meet live terror face to face and lose. 4 Why must the young male nurse who preps the plain Of my knife-thrower’s-target abdomen With his conversant razor, talking snicks Of scything into my sedated ears, Talk also in his flat and friendly voice, So far from showdowns, on a blasé note Of reassurance, learnt by classroom rote? It is that he must make his living, too. 5 If Hell abides on earth this must be it: This too-bright-lit-at-all-hours-of-the-day- And-night recovery room, where nurses flit In stroboscopic steps between the beds All cheek by jowl that hold recoverers Suspended in the grog of half-damped pain And tubularities of light-blue light. For condiment in this mulled mix, there are Assorted groans and screams; and, lest repose Outstrip the sufferer, there is his own Throat-filling Gobi, mucous membrane gone Dry as Arabia, as barren of Hydropsy as a sunburnt cage of bone Perched on parched rocks where game Parcheesian (A devil figure, this) went, wended his Bent way to harvest, for a shekel, rugs, And pack them back by camel over sands Of nightmare to transship to richer lands Where millions of small rills plash into streams That give rise to great rivers—such wet dreams Afflict the desiccate on their interminable way Up through the layers of half-light to day. 6 The riddle of the Sphinx. Man walks on three Legs at the last. I walk on three, one of Which is a wheeled I.V. pole, when I rise From bed the first time to make my aged way Into the toilet, where, while my legs sway And the pole sways, swinging its censer high, I wait to urinate, and cannot make My mortal coils distill a drop, as time Stumps past and leaves me swaying there. Defeat: I roll and hobble back to bed, to the Refrain of cheeping wheels. Soon the young man With his snake-handler’s fist of catheters Will come to see me and supply the lack Of my drugged muscles with the gravity Of his solution, and I’ll void into A beige bag clipped to the bedside, one of The bottles, bags, and tubes I’m tethered to As a condition of continuance. The body swells until it duns the mind With importunities in this refined, White-sheeted torture, practiced by a kind, Withdrawn white face trained in the arts of love. 7 Home, and the lees of autumn scuttle up To my halt feet: fat, sportive maple leaves Struck into ochre by the frost and stripped From their umbilic cords to skate across The blacktop drive and fetch up on my shoes As if including me in their great fall, Windy with rumors of the coming ice. Though fallen, frostbit, yellowed also, I Cannot participate in their late game But must leave them to hide and seek a place To decompose in, while I clamber up Long enneads of stairs to the room where I’ll recompose myself to durance in A world of voices and surprises, for As long as Clotho draws my filament— To my now flagging wonder and applause— From indefatigable spinnerets, Until her sister widows, having set The norms for length and texture of each strand And sharpened their gross shears, come cut it off And send me to befriend the winter leaves.

To keep anxiety at bay, my friend called chemo dragonfly love. Those insects — christened, in places, the devil’s darning needles — hover as they contort their joined bodies into a heart, the male with pincers. Finger cutter, horse killer, ear stick, eye pisser.Look closely at the eyes of a female darner and you may well see dark puncture marks. As a slow drip through an IV. As a pill. Through a port into a vein. She called nausea erotica. Just the same, we name our storms to lessen them — 
not a tropical cyclone, but Arabella, with ballet shoes and bun. Tumors, too, were friends, waiting at the bus stop with backpacks in the morning. Cindy French braids Carrie’s hair, yanking at the scalp to form the tight crisscross. Not hair loss, but deep conditioning. She gave us the new lexicon on stationery embossed with a red rose speckled by raindrops. The stem still had its thorns. Ring-around-the-rosy, red rover, red rover, send her right over. She called death the world of10,000things: the dragon courting its damsel, catheter tubing in the wastebin, video of a toddler biting his brother, pas de deux, full-
sugar ice cream, Crimson Queen, Trumpeter, Red Knockout, Tuscany Superb  ...    I knew her as Rose Shapiro. At the funeral I learned she was born Passalacqua: to cross the river, to pass a glass of water.

A stabbing in miniature, it is, a tiny crime, my own blood parceled drop by drop and set on the flickering tongue of this machine. It is the spout-punching of trees for syrup new and smooth and sweeter than nature ever intended. It is Sleeping Beauty's curse and fascination. It is the dipstick measuring of oil from the Buick's throat, the necessary maintenance. It is every vampire movie ever made. Hand, my martyr without lips, my quiet cow. I'll milk your fingertips for all they're worth. For what they're worth. Something like a harvest, it is, a tiny crime.

He changes into a bird, and that’s the only difference. Rain on the improved sidewalk seems inspired after so much heat. Look at the objects that have already wilted and died. Someone is losing hair trying to penetrate the meaning of death—rather language which postpones dying is inventing a drug to keep us alive. Being similar never made this body more true. Bills for electricity and answering service are burning inside the hearth. My dream, to have a hearth and set an example for fading youth. The conspicuous peacock neither turns nor changes, yet suddently loses its feathers, buckles in the dust and dies. The meaning is as fantastic as any truth. Language invents a painkilling drug for restoring youth—an occasion inviting feelings which jolt and never subside. I mean he is dying again, slowly, as he gains time.

Green first thing each day sees waves— the chair, armoire, overhead fixtures, you name it, waves—which, you might say, things really are, but Green just lies there awhile breathing long slow breaths, in and out, through his mouth like he was maybe seasick, until in an hour or so the waves simmer down and then the trails and colors off of things, that all quiets down as well and Green starts to think of washing up, breakfast even with everything still moving around, colors, trails, and sounds, from the street and plumbing next door, vibrating—of course you might say that's what sound really is, after all, vibrations—but Green, he's not thinking physics at this stage, nuh-uh, our boy's only trying to get himself out of bed, get a grip, but sometimes, and this is the kicker, another party, shall we say, is in the room with Green, and Green knows this other party and they do not get along, which understates it quite a bit, quite a bit, and Green knows that this other cat is an hallucination, right, but these two have a routine that goes way back and Green starts hollering, throwing stuff until he's all shook up, whole day gone to hell, bummer . . . Anyhow, the docs are having a look, see if they can't dream up a cocktail, but seems our boy ate quite a pile of acid one time, clinical, wow, enough juice for half a block— go go go, little Greenie—blew the wiring out from behind his headlights and now, no matter what, can't find the knob to turn off the show.

God knows how our neighbors manage to breathe. No one is allowed to touch me for infection is a hazard of mercy I will not transmit as Legion transcribed from the mouth of Error into his body and sent into a herd of swine who sent it to the sea who’s been trying to return to earth since creation and nearly succeeds every day. I just took my temperature. 98 degrees. I am better than healthy. I am cooling even as earth heats, even as it meets the sea further inland and negotiates distance from increasingly disadvantaged position. I am cooling because nothing touches me. Others may go to the petting zoo and country fair but don’t even tell me what they touch there. I’m taking my temperature again; my thermometer is digital and pink and its beep is my name being read from the book of life, which is available on Kindle and allows me to avoid the public library but contains peculiar punctuation errors and is transcribed by evangelists while they wait in line at gates you can’t see from here. 98.5. Still cooler than life. I have another glass of water, and feel you turning in me, my little book, flipping over and over, it’s time for bed little sow, little sow. The book of death is open on my bedside table and is called The Pregnancy Countdown