160 Illness poems

in a different version of this I'm the one sitting up in bed while the nurse says deep breaths   listens to my lungs through the cold antenna of her stethoscope   you're the one sitting in a chair in the corner with a half hearted smile plastered to your face in a different version of this we're both in bed   hunched over while two nurses   sisters actually   listen to our lungs   your husband and my wife sit in the corners of the room both of them completely useless in a different version of this I'm in a chair in the corner while my sister sits up in bed   you're the nurse who listens to my sister breathing   you glance at me for an instant and return my uncertain smile in a different version of this I sit up abruptly in bed   I'm breathing deeply   you put your hand on my back and say go back to sleep   you're fine   everything is fine

For days to situate the flesh in whose inadequate precinct motionless: a monolith of the often spoken of which nothing is certain: or abstract of whose gender to the use of all acknowledged desire formal parlance & pronoun to form the stars across your back: whose hardened muscle: tremendous lateral delta of which to the shoulders: there is a way from yes: the very inside an eternal tick of the left eye: a language not only illegible as the vain translation of a fictive contradictory self & its consonant verb to be: but the body’s crystal falling through a grey film of failed memory & brushfire this Autumn midnight: to unfold (in the form of your body) pleasured corners of a place in which the difficult new breathing and I are foreigners

The world has certified itself rid of all but the argument: to eradicate or not the small stock of variola frozen, quarantined—a dormancy it has refused, just once, for a woman behind a sterile lens, her glass slide a clearest, most becoming pane. How could it resist slipping away with her, that discrete first pock?

A tang approaches, like the smell of snow. Illness like a color deepens— pale gray, thick-in-a-cloak gray, secret coat silk, and finally the weight of rough pelts heaped on the bed. The last enchantment of the day is tearing pages out of a book. The paper soft and thin, like falling asleep (a hand backstage smoothing my hair: the school friend, Lakamp, became an undertaker) My baby laughs to rip the pages. Stays by me, does this damage. The tearing moves like voltage through my own hands. Oh mother skimming fever I need him to linger are you still happening there, in your body? I just want to lie at the edge of breaking. Yes, I am still backstage, here in my body. The baby pulls out another page— leaving him would come this easily. I will bind myself to the thinnest sounds, the feather coming out of the pillow. Please keep ripping up the words. Please don’t need anything from me.

Time declines all, they say. Progression inevitable, they say. Hills that rise slant down. You have the floor, they say. How far down, 
I say. They say how low can you go. How steep a slope, I say. Slight drop, they say. Plateau. Slump, not flatline, they say.You understand, these were words before: up, down, I say, words I do not own but feel I should. Downward, they say, is normal, but plateau is where we’ll put you. Stay flexible. Incline toward this wind. Go ahead and zanaflex, they say. Progress, the way of the future, they say. We are 
inclined to say it’s relatively stable. Mesa, not mountain, they say.The fall-off hills rise in masses, flat on top. White clouds bite down on them like teeth, I recall, chomping. What’s the grade of incline, I say. They say mild decline. They say they feel inclined to know. Come down here, I say. Take a tumble. Slide. Incline your ear. They decline my invitation. Making progress, they say. An upgrade. Very busy.Your health has reached its quota and is no longer available, they say. Have I been downgraded, essentially going downhill, I say. A positive result yields a negative outcome, they say. They decline to know for sure. Testing negative, they say, has a positive outcome. A decline in contrast sensitivity, I say. They say slow descent, the good kind. A little tip. Lucky dip. I assent and say all’s downhill from here. I say downhill into the flood. Dive, I say, not cannonball. Controlled fall. I am inclined to take a dip, I say, from time to time, but always rise to the surface. Dip down, they say. Tip forward. Don’t let us (drop now) push you, they say, a nudge. I say it is our policy to decline tips, a pleasure to — Arching off the incline, I incline to a different wind.

How difficult it is to say goodbye to scourge. For years we were obsessed with you, your complex glycoproteins and your sly, haphazard reproduction, your restraint in your resistance, how you bathed so slight yet fierce in our most intimate secretions. We will remember you for generations; electron micrographs of you seem quaint already, in the moment of our victory. How difficult it is to claim one’s right to living honestly. The honesty you taught was nothing quite as true as death, but neither was it final. Yes, we vanquished you, with latex, protease inhibitors, a little common sense— what’s that, you say? That some remain at risk? How dare you try to threaten us again! Of course, you’d like to make outrageous claims that some behaviors haven’t changed, that some have not had access to the drugs that mask your presence in the body. Difficult it is, how very sad, to see you strain (no pun intended) at response—our quilts, our bravest poetry, our deaths with grace and dignity have put you in your place. This elegy itself renounces you, as from this consciousness you’ve been erased. The love for you was very strong, the hot pursuits so many of us reveled in— but what once felt like love was really not. I hardly know what I will find to hate as much as I have loved and hated what you brought to bear upon my verse, the weight of your oppression and the joys of truth. How difficult it is—to face the white of nothingness, of clarity. We win!

Says fifty-four-year-old obese Hispanic female — I wonder if they mean the one with long black braids, Peruvian, who sells tamales at the farmers’ market, tells me I’m too thin, I better eat; or is she the Dominican with too much rouge and almond eyes at the dry cleaner’s who must have been so beautiful in her youth; or maybe she’s the Cuban lady drunk on grief who I’ve seen half-asleep, alone as if that bench were only hers, the park her home at last; or else the Mexican who hoards the littered papers she collects and says they are her “documents”; if not, it could be that Colombian drug addict whose Spanish, even when she’s high, is perfect; or maybe it’s the one who never says exactly where she’s from, but who reminds me of my grandmother, poor but refined, lace handkerchief balled up in her plump hand, who died too young from a condition that some doctor, nose in her chart, overlooked.

Where is the word I want? Groping in the thicket, about to pinch the dangling berry, my fingerpads close on air. I can hear it scrabbling like a squirrel on the oak's far side. Word, please send over this black stretch of ocean your singular flare, blaze your topaz in the mind's blank. I could always pull the gift from the lucky-dip barrel, scoop the right jewel from my dragon's trove.... Now I flail, the wrong item creaks up on the mental dumbwaiter. No use— it's turning out of sight, a bicycle down a Venetian alley— I clatter after, only to find gondolas bobbing in sunny silence, a pigeon mumbling something I just can't catch.

Meanwhile, meanwhile used to be my limp’s accompaniment. Meanwhile (as my legs maneuvered an abyss), a ballet is beginning, and the dancer’s perfect feet propel her downstage, where applause is waiting. Meanwhile a sad man stomps his gloom away by stomping evenly: one two, one two means never blue, his motto goes. But I was born to other paces, different measures; the roads I take are undulant and lined with fluid hedges, trees that take a dive whenever I am near; a bird’s ascent slows down to an eternal crawl; and when a doctor’s order takes me to the city it is a jagged gotham, full of spires that waver in the sky like falling knives or silver metronomes. Meanwhile, meanwhile (the rhythm steadied me) a lover steals upon his mistress with the quietness that only flatfeet know. So quietly that he might just as well have stayed at home, I add when my self-confidence is at a high point, and the view is at its best. And sometimes I have thoughts, before the surge of meanwhile drowns them out, that limping is a thing I’d voluntarily take up if I were just as upright as the rest: I see myself, erect, stampeding through a garden’s sturdy, stale geometry and nearly knocked down by the urge to say incline, I like your style; ravine, hello; how many good things share your curvature; it is the slant of rainfall when the wind convinces it to drift; it is a sight that those with level heads and steady feet miss out on. In a coracle (my new enthusiasm leads to stories), you are better, bent; the more you tilt, the more the water welcomes you, its addled waves a live reminder of your being there, its leaping fish a sign that you are still alert and in command. The clubfoots have a myth concerning Orpheus’ head, and though I doubt its authenticity I like the way it goes: hacked off, the head was rolling down the river, when a change came over it—it bobbed, it jumped, it shuddered, it caught itself in weeds, but struggled free because of all its energy, and then its eyes began to come to life, as if a pretty tune enthralled it even then. Meanwhile his killers marched away, saying he had his ups and downs. Of course, of course to hobble is to hinder: sick is sick, no matter how you change the second term to suit your needs. But sometimes I am sure that when I limp along a crooked street, my dancing shadow is a model for the stiffs who hurry past without a sound, showing them this way, that way, as they reach the little level huts they call home.

Two floors up, at the corner of Hearst and Shattuck, he’s clamped for good in an iron lung. When it’s time to eat he nudges his head a sweaty mile to the edge of the pillow. It takes a while. His brilliant bloodshot light-blue eyes steer me from cupboard to fridge: he would like his chicken burrito cut into bite-size pieces, a bent straw for his glass of water, please. How does the body live its only life in a cage? I watch him compute the distance from bar to bar, and squeeze between them with a violent compression, a fury of bursting free that doesn’t last. His will is a crowbar, angled to pry up the rooted intractable weight of matter. I watch him slyly, I check out the way he does it. He does it. But pain in its absolute privacy weighs what it weighs. I come here to study the soul, posing one question a dozen ways, most of them silent. “If I’m only a body,” he laughs, “I’m up shit creek.” His laugh a gritty eruption of rock, salt and breath. Like me he writes poems but he does it letter by letter on a propped keyboard, the mouth-stick wobbling between his teeth. That kind of speed keeps a poet accountable. He won’t ever say, “The grass is very green” when it’s only green.