160 Illness poems

Hunched in the bath, four ibuprofen gulped too late to dull the muscle cramping

Memory was the room I entered down a long corridor Thrown by the white drugs of pain though pain Was adrift on a glassy stream of green tide Where images flickered and ran on I didn’t write poetry for publication In those days but to grab the attention Of readers nearby who had been crushed by life Who floated across the exercise yard like headaches Smoking rag-cigarettes looking sideways For the next punishment for a break or maybe distraction Chips of memory kept rising to the surface Of our minds to take another bite I had no idea why poetry the squid caught me It clung to my brain in the damaging climate A creature in the alien element of air Arising from centuries of survival Thoughts must be inky and capable Of working the bait with a black beak For a quick kill and a metaphysical rise up through the abyss Poetry in those days was a handmade lure There were no fish or birds so I spun my lines To the ones with heads spring-loaded with resentment Their temper a red fleck twitching in an eye While poems of the future waited in line to hear my number

It was the week of asking. Asking to watch her eat. Asking if she understood the doctors’ questions. Asking her to explain the difference between wanting to die right now, and dying later. The tumor making certain answers unquestionable. I watched her point to the incense dish from which someone swept all the ashes up. Asking if she recognized us. Because that is what the living want: thinking it is a sign we have been loved. But the answer was a summer drive, a mountain, piles of leaves beneath which a wolf slept, suckling her cubs. Some deaths are good and it makes them hard to grieve. She was, at times, in great pain. We wanted her to die, too. That was important. But first we wanted her to remember. From the bed, a finger pressed into a pile of leaves. Gray haunch, unmovable ashes.I didn’t want to disturb their tableau

has a moth in her palm, a river on her tongue, a scalpel in her boat, a lump in her throat, a gamble in her shoe, a fire in her den, a shadow in her flesh, a flutter in her breast, like everybody else.

I ask your doctor of infectious disease if she's read Williams   he cured sick babies I tell her and begin describing spring and all   she's looking at the wall now the floor   now your chart now the door   never heard of him she says but I can't stop explaining how important this is I need to know your doctor believes in the tenacity of nature to endure   I'm past his heart attack   his strokes   and now as if etching the tombstone myself   I find I can't remember the date he died or even the year   of what now are we the pure products   and what does that even mean   pure   isn't it obvious   we are each our own culture alive with the virus that's waiting to unmake us

Wednesday, August 02, 2006 8 a.m. --Mom is wearing a Kailua Surfriders Staff teeshirt this morning. That must be Bryant’s old shirt. No, she insists, it’s an Iowa teeshirt. The young man down the street, the one she’s never met, gave her an Iowa teeshirt when he heard she’d gone to Iowa. It’s Iowa. --I didn’t know she was coming today. -- She was sweet at 4 a.m., Bryant says. They had the first conversation about the shirt then. --Israel sends more ground troops into Lebanon.There’s an opportunity there, we read in the Washington Post. --I don’t like you. I don’t like them. I don’t like them either. And Susan? She laughs. --Compare and contrast the acquisition of a language to its loss. Avoid the trap of merely saying that the latter happens in reverse order of the former. You are likely to do better if you see them as similar processes, though one leads to gain, the other loss. Think chemistry. Think performance of a script. Think Harold and the Purple Crayon. Think Harold Pinter. --Think two old men fishing for a beautiful young woman in a lake. Think one of them might get “lucky.” --When are you leaving? Where are you going? Are you taking the kids? --Sangha and May hatch plots of their own. Go quiet when I arrive. In this life, you either make plots or have them hatched around you. Like eggs. Like poisoned ones. posted by Susan at 6:46 AM 0 comments

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What I would like to give them for a change is not the usual prescription with its hubris of the power to restore, to cure; what I would like to give them, ill from not enough of laying in the sun not caring what the onlookers might think while feeding some banana to their dogs— what I would like to offer them is this, not reassurance that their lungs sound fine, or that the mole they’ve noticed change is not a melanoma, but instead of fear transfigured by some doctorly advice I’d like to give them my astonishment at sudden rainfall like the whole world weeping, and how ridiculously gently it slicked down my hair; I’d like to give them that, the joy I felt while staring in your eyes as you learned epidemiology (the science of disease in populations), the night around our bed like timelessness, like comfort, like what I would give to them.

Not long ago, I studied medicine. It was terrible, what the body told. I’d look inside another person’s mouth, And see the desolation of the world. I’d see his genitals and think of sin. Because my body speaks the stranger’s language, I’ve never understood those nods and stares. My parents held me in their arms, and still I think I’ve disappointed them; they care And stare, they nod, they make their pilgrimage To somewhere distant in my heart, they cry. I look inside their other-person’s mouths And see the wet interior of souls. It’s warm and red in there—like love, with teeth. I’ve studied medicine until I cried All night. Through certain books, a truth unfolds. Anatomy and physiology, The tiny sensing organs of the tongue— Each nameless cell contributing its needs. It was fabulous, what the body told.

O sleepy city of reeling wheelchairs where a mouse can commit suicide if he can concentrate long enough on the history book of rodents in this underground town of electrical wheelchairs! The girl who is always pregnant and bruised like a pear rides her many-stickered bicycle backward up the staircase of the abandoned trolleybarn. Yesterday was warm. Today a butterfly froze in midair; and was plucked like a grape by a child who swore he could take care of it. O confident city where the seeds of poppies pass for carfare, where the ordinary hornets in a human’s heart may slumber and snore, where bifocals bulge in an orange garage of daydreams, we wait in our loose attics for a new season as if for an ice-cream truck. An Indian pony crosses the plains whispering Sanskrit prayers to a crater of fleas. Honeysuckle says: I thought I could swim. The Mayor is urinating on the wrong side of the street! A dandelion sends off sparks: beware your hair is locked! Beware the trumpet wants a glass of water! Beware a velvet tabernacle! Beware the Warden of Light has married an old piece of string!