160 Illness poems

Being in a coma can play havoc with your sense of time. It can turn your eyes from brown to blue. It can grow hair on your belly, it can get you lost between bedroom and office. If you are to live in extra innings, you’ll have to watch the corners, step around bad things, ignore insults and welcome loving hands that sculpt you in your chair. Being refrigerated and put to sleep, dropping out of time, you have to save your humor and guard it, a precious trove to bring out as needed, white strips on the road flying beneath your vehicle, eat them up, wake to a busy underground world, where people in body bags keep passing by, tilted toward you know where. Where half the people in your life have gone, dissolving your sense of time, which was never supposed to have an end.

1    In a concussion, the mind severs the pain: you don’t remember flying off a motorcycle, and landing face first in a cholla. But a woman stabbed in her apartment, by a prowler searching for money and drugs, will never forget her startled shriek die in her throat, blood soaking into the floor. The quotidian violence of the world is like a full moon rising over the Ortiz mountains; its pull is everywhere. But let me live a life of violent surprise and startled joy. I want to thrust a purple iris into your hand, give you a sudden embrace. I want to live as Wang Hsi-chih lived writing characters in gold ink on black silk— not to frame on a wall, but to live the splendor now. 2    Deprived of sleep, she hallucinated and, believing she had sold the genetic research on carp, signed a confession. Picking psilocybin mushrooms in the mountains of Veracruz, I hear tin cowbells in the slow rain, see men wasted on pulque sitting under palm trees. Is it so hard to see things as they truly are: a route marked in red ink on a map, the shadows of apricot leaves thrown in wind and sun on a wall? It is easy to imagine a desert full of agaves and golden barrel cactus, red earth, a red sun. But to truly live one must see things as they are, as they might become: a wrench is not a fingerprint on a stolen car, nor baling wire the undertow of the ocean. I may hallucinate, but see the men in drenched clothes as men who saw and saw and refuse to see. 3    Think of being a judge or architect or trombonist, and do not worry whether thinking so makes it so. I overhear two men talking in another room; I cannot transcribe the conversation word for word, but know if they are vexed or depressed, joyful or nostalgic. An elm leaf floats on a pond. Look, a child wants to be a cardiologist then a cartographer, but wanting so does not make it so. It is not a question of copying out the Heart Sutra in your own blood on an alabaster wall. It is not a question of grief or joy. But as a fetus grows and grows, as the autumn moon ripens the grapes, greed and cruelty and hunger for power ripen us, enable us to grieve, act, laugh, shriek, see, see it all as the water on which the elm leaf floats. 4    Write out the memories of your life in red-gold disappearing ink, so that it all dies, no lives. Each word you speak dies, no lives. Is it all at once in the mind? I once stepped on a sea urchin, used a needle to dig out the purple spines; blood soaked my hands. But one spine was left, and I carried it a thousand miles. I saw then the olive leaves die on the branch, saw dogs tear flesh off a sheep’s corpse. To live at all is to grieve; but, once, to have it all at once is to see a shooting star: shooting star shooting star.

In her illness Elizabeth believes we do this deliberately, the washing of her body. She blames me, her Japanese daughter-in-law for having made keeping her clean a fetish. Angry, she says we do this to torment her soul, the shower a hot spray of needles we subject on her moon-colored skin. She hates it even more if I’m there to wash her. She wants her son, the person she thinks of these days as her lover, or husband, or father. Memory and privacy, she cries at their loss as I soap her down like an old car. What protestations! And as I listen to her, I think of these bodies we have given so freely to men, yet feel ashamed of when in the eyes of another woman. How she fawns when she thinks a man’s around. Today, she bangs the walls. “I hate you! The water’s too wet!” Hanging onto the safety bars, she pitches back and forth like a child, wanting to be let out at the gate. I wash her back. She spins around in my soap-lathered hands, and loosening her face in mine, she glares. She sticks out her tongue, and biting down on it, she squeals, jowls swinging, arms jiggling. Then, in a dive of both hands between her legs, she drops to a semi-squat, simian posture and thrusts her pelvis bones forward like mountains in an antediluvian upheaval. In a gesture of obscenity, she unfolds her petals and displays her withered sex to me— the same way boys moon, flip the bird or grab their crotch and waggle their tongues— the profane she feels but can’t articulate.

LAUDS Somehow I am sturdier, more shore than sea-spray as I thicken through the bedroom door. I gleam of sickness. You give me morning, Lord, as you give earthquake to all architecture. I can forget. You put that sugar in the melon’s breath, and it is wet with what you are. (I, too, ferment.) You rub the hum and simple warmth of summer from afar into the hips of insects and of everything. I can forget. And like the sea, one more machine without a memory, I don’t believe that you made me. PRIME

We wear harnesses like crossing guards. In a pouch over the heart, over stent and bypass, a black box with leads pressed onto metal nipples. We pedal and tread and row while our signals are picked up by antennas on the ceiling, X’s like the eyes cartoonists give the dead. Angels of telemetry with vials of nitro watch over us. We beam to their monitors now a barn dance, now a moonwalk. They cuff us and pump and we keep on so tomorrow will live off today. Nurse, we won’t forget the animated video of our cholesterol highway where LDL, black-hatted scowling donut holes on wheels, blocked traffic. But with muscles like gutta-percha, can we leave time’s gurney in the dust? By now only the dead know more about gravity than we do. In reply, a tape of Little Richard or Jerry Lee comes on and we’re singing, aloud or not, all pale infarcted pedalers, rowers, treadmillers, and our hearts are rising in the east.

This morning as I gulp five gleaming white capsules of shark cartilage to make me strong again, I want another look at the terrible eye with its nictitating membrane, those extravagant fins, the ampullae of Lorenzini freckling its snout, all of that huge body on the rippled sand in turtle grass with an entourage of neon-blue barjacks, and a remora wriggling in and out of its gill-slits. I even want to touch it again, and this time not just with my fingertips, but my palm, loveline and lifeline, my wrist, the underside of my forearm. I want to press my cheek against its chaste astonishing skin smooth as a headstone, want the touch that feels like a blow, the summoning touch, the touch of reckoning, the consummating touch, as well as the stinging sandblown touch of regret, the stranger's touch on the train, the reproachful touch, even the last touch of a human who has lain down with a shark, the touch I have spent my life so ignorant of, your touch as you unbutton my shirt, the searing, unbearable touch.

We come here These little pillars of salt Placed into the hands Of physicians With debt sweats A gross product Of the sex apparatus There are expired teens There are the old That die in the summer The situation When a nation Loses its beloved celebrity It tries to out-mourn one another Extort them of their talent Versions of these chosen ones Hair flowing free and unrestricted Meanwhile The curbs are laced With water soluble prescriptions Running down into gutters Phosphorescent in the streetlight Medications Available in avocado Coppertone Aqua and white I suffer from the occasional Emotionally draining dream about turtles However The simple idea of omnipresent neutrality Is difficult Too much blood Spills in my dreams It’s a vascular debacle Mantras and Ak-47s Are boring In the park Getting some vitamin D The sunlight on my blue jeans I’m a deadened sapphire Reading Didion A psychic residue of fortune is on me Didion writes, “I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be” I can’t handle fate The aphrodisiac of lying to myself The battery flavor of anxiety Shooting the messenger Having a god that doesn’t ‘get me’

1. READING THE RESULTS I don’t move, but the inside corner of my right eye turns glassy, then shatters, hands focus more sharply. I don’t move, but the pigeon shudders on the sill. The door opens to a maze of wallpaper, family photos— their bliss-frieze burns the last unaffected corner of my sight, like molten Karo. My husband’s mouth collapses, and the air about his shoulders has crystallized. We don’t say a word, all the noise is around us, the letter, half-folded, on the desk, an albatross, a dove. 2. POSITIVE Because in those days there were no words for such things I took handfuls of vitamins and slept with a trumpet flower under my pillow, I ate at the Kiev on Second Avenue at four every morning: enormous boiled potato pierogis shivering in pools of butter, little sides of sautéed onions, paper cups of pure sour cream, Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray, no ice, as chaser, but now when the call comes I’m sitting in the kitchen with two plastic funnels over my breasts and the pump on the coutner with its hydraulic suck and the cast iron sputtering of eggs, the kids already bickering at table, milk flowing into baby bottles, even now the word heroin makes me feel the lovely way a body can go slack from inside out. 3. A SINGLE DROP I’d never paid much mind to my implements, but now I paint “Fire Engine Red” on the handle of my razor, a single drop on my nail clippers, one long stroke on my lethal toothbrush to cordon off my blood, I tend and sop each splash or seep, soiled band-aids, love-smeared sheets— every bleeding gum, torn hangnail, paper cut, scrape, gully  of cracked lip another hazard, each infectious throb now forever watched as I patrol my body’s raging arroyo in the family bathroom, to keep my children safe from me. 4. PAPER GOWNS X-rays, lab coat, and me wearing those delicate petals (gaping, cold through the sleeves). He asks me to extend my palms: the motion is of pushing away. Breathe with your mouth, he says, soft tup, tup, tup, along my spine, as if checking a cantaloupe. There is a piece of gum beneath the windowsill, green imprint of a thumb. We’re talking percentages, genotypes, we’re talking bundled pharmaceuticals. Studies, it seems, are inconclusive. I try to look at the big picture: a talc-free rubber glove at the edge of the trash, neither in, nor out. On the insurance card, raised numbers, black ink worn away. There's a girl on the street with her head back, the strap of her dress falling carelessly.

After I turned forty, I received my first 42 millirem dose of X-rays. I heated the machine with my uncupped body, tabled my rib cage to cool shoulders dear as a beloved relative who could no longer see due to intraocular weather in her eyes. Women in an outer room awaited bone scans. Backscatter is 5 microrems or .005 millirems. A dental bitewing X-ray, around 0.5 millirem. Mammogram, 40 to 70. Do not know about bone scans. Annual background radiation is 300, higher if we live on a mesa or often fly. Ozone plus uranium decay, daughters of radon gas. How about our radiogenic thyroids, butterflies shimmering with table-salt iodine? Peonies of  bone marrow spun rails of flesh in a waiting room of  jacquard chairs, of  round mirrors and water lilies, paper hydrangeas, African violets. If  I broke the silence, then I drew the flame of  your sun into my chest. Unshielded, I entered an inner room to don a rose-colored cotton kimono. For a minute, I thought of  flying fish roe and forgot its  Japanese name. What is the risk of carcinogenic harm while estrogen acts on my cells? Coralline of  the radiology room inside my mouth, the clinical air exuded an odor of magnolia powder although no one wore it, a scent riper than radical scavengers of  blackberries. I uttered a prayer of radiolucence then remembered the word,tobiko.

I like to see doctors cough. What kind of human being would grab all your money just when you're down? I'm not saying they enjoy this: "Sorry, Mr. Rodriguez, that's it, no hope! You might as well hand over your wallet." Hell no, they'd rather be playing golf and swapping jokes about our feet. Some of them smoke marijuana and are alcoholics, and their moral turpitude is famous: who gets to see most sex organs in the world? Not poets. With the hours they keep they need drugs more than anyone. Germ city, there's no hope looking down those fire-engine throats. They're bound to get sick themselves sometime; and I happen to be there myself in a high fever taking my plastic medicine seriously with the doctors, who are dying.