This is a picture of my beautiful sister Millie before her brain tumor. She's in the hospital again, this time with unbearable pain from her collapsed spine, a result of eight years of taking Prednisone to replace the work of her pituitary, which was wrecked when a large benign tumor was removed from her brain. The pain is awful and continuous. They can’t operate on her spine in her condition. They throw a cocktail of drugs at it.So phrases from the poem I wrote about her original surgery and her long unconsciousness afterward come to mind. Not a poem. I couldn’t write a poem. It came out as a prose poem. The need to just SAY overrode the need to express the inexpressible. There is a slogging in immediate suffering. It seemed that it was prose. Prose is the bones and tissue we're made of. I guess that was why. “Deliver me from metaphor,” I write in one part:
Knife
Coach Cars of Days
Is the happy part days or moments later? Earlier? Things slide through, a Metroliner of metaphors: Thanksgiving, Christmas, bearing up against the sudden walls, tattered flags, truck beds, concrete pipes, corrugated brown warehouses, silted ponds with geese. Refuse and rust, the various ball fields, one game in progress, its flush and fuss, no reference to us. On the train to Boston for Thanksgiving. Or, all of us at the long table with the china, plate after plate of shining destination.
A Moment Suspended Like a Plumb Line
Over the motion of seasons, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Or like a knife, or whatever is used to saw open your brain to go after the tumor the size of a tangerine, caught in the crux of the optic nerves, at the carotid artery, the pituitary. The delicacy of this requires ignoring metaphor. Even though a person’s transformed—moment, moment, moment—the trick is in keeping track. The trick’s in staying with you like a surgeon. Who cares who our crazy father is, our poor mother was? I help you snap the flapping green gowns, one in front, one in back. They put your clothes in a plastic sack.
The Aesthetically Pleasing Shape of the Human Body
The lesser is to the greater as the greater is to the whole: the Golden Section: cross, crux, crucial, crucifix. In front of St. Mary’s hospital in Saginaw, Michigan, the statue of Mary stands demure, bronze, encouraging. But high over the main doors, she’s art deco, almost gone already, refined to memory, an aerodynamic flame.
The Unfaithfulness of the Mind
The way it keeps drifting up and down, forward and back, the sign of the cross. Thursday, the night before, John made quattro formaggi pizza. Pizza Giovanni, he said. This time last year you were in Florence together. It’s extraordinary, all of it, the pencil point of a tumor you were born with, and now, its arrogance, assertiveness. And the breath that’s traveled though a corridor so many times it believes it’s entitled. As if the unimaginably vast universe could agree to keep meeting itself like this! Corridor. Corridor clicking along: door, door, door, a movement like the bowels, the diaphragm, carrying us.
The Speechlessness of the Sun
Rising over the fields on our way to the hospital, huge orange Midwest sun, spreading like butter along the snow-ripples. Christmas lights still on, the shapes of trees and reindeer, those night messages, even as the sun starts up again. I try to think what the messages might contribute to the general silence. Deliver me from metaphor. I can deal with the painted windows of the hospital lobby—an angel on a yellow star, dangling his feet, a pink-nosed mouse carrying a spotted Christmas ornament, a yellow-chested penguin—because of their obvious intention. The angel, the mouse, the penguin keep trying for three and a half hours as we wait to hear from surgery.
Silence As If Heard From the End of a Tunnel
At the end of the tunnel, your shocked, quivering body, curled, cut to the core, the ventilator, the mass of tubes. I know I’m living right now, complexly, many chambered. I touch your cheek, the you-and-not-you. The bruised right eye flowering, the brain seizing, trying to steady itself like a small craft. How long I have lived, finally to see how we can be ripped in a moment far from ourselves. How time can be collected into glucose bags, urine bags, potassium bags. I am touching your arm as if it were our mother’s arm, or my other arm, disappearing.
The Shiftlessness of the Landscape
A couple more inches of snow. John has a tree sent, and your sons and I hang every silly ornament, trying to get them right. Your neighbors have tacked their usual obscenely pink bows on greenery. What’s been withheld, the garish, begins to shine forth, unencumbered. Thanksgiving to Christmas, the year moves to finish itself, its other nature.
A Knife Passing Through Butter Barely Disturbs a Thing
The molecules part, the atoms steer their flocks of electrons to either side, like mother ducks. How spacious matter is, spacious as a laugh, the way it opens the diaphragm. Here’s a joke: your head wrapped in gauze, tuft of hair, tube sticking out the top. You’re a cartoon sick person! The tube drains off blood: ah, an escape route from the interior. I don’t know now if we could have escaped our childhood after all, even though we tried as hard as standup comedians. Here are the smiling nurses, keeping the machines occupied while you go on getting away. When we came, it was just past Thanksgiving. Now it’s past New Year’s, nothing between.
How Satisfying is the Knife, How Pure
I envy the knife; it is all performance. It has no interest in the infinitely slow absorption of blood back into the brain, the wheeze of the respirator. I envy the CT scan, the slices of brain back-lit on the screen in scientific portions so thin no one need feel sorry for any one of them. I envy the white areas and the gray, the way they keep their own counsel. I begin to suspect that days are a human creation, that the light and dark cancel each other out. To stand by your bed is to be nothing. Your tongue is a little bit out, your one eye a little bit open, but none of this has to do with you.
Things That Could Happen
(1) A nuclear bomb could tire of waiting. (2) Global warming could keep on melting the icecaps until a huge amount of methane gas is released that causes further warming, forming a cloud so dense as to block out the sun, causing a deep freeze. (3) High energy particle accelerators could create hyperdense “strange matter” that attracts nearby nuclei, thus growing larger until the entire planet is compressed into a sphere no more than 100 meters in diameter and rolls away under the bed like a lost nickle.
What Actually Happens
What actually happens when I speak to you, after the tiny bones of hammer, anvil, stirrup? After the internal seas, waving their 20,000 cilia? What happens after their little electric jolts to the brain? What happens when I call the family, one by one, on my cell phone? Between the word and the word, nothing but radio signals. I could be saying a poem—who knows what happens out of sight between the words? And who knows if what comes up on the other side is past or future? I could be Jonah, trying to say something from here about fear and hope, those lozenges of abstraction, among the slippery fish-belly ligaments.
Cradle of Words
Remember now in your sleep the prayers of various flavors of Christians, of Jews, of the one Muslim in the hospital lab, of Buddhists, of several atheists, in their way—the many who offered to carve for you out of the dark a bright cradle of words upon which you can be carried. This one please carry. Carry on myth, on history. Encrust this one with our longing, with the magic longing calls its own. Saw this one in half and let her emerge whole. Through whatever narrow sleeve, let mystery fly out like a dove.
The Cheerfulness of the Nurses
The way they raise their voices as they come in, as if they wish to reinforce the need for living. Tweakers of tubes, adjusters of clamps and pillows. They flip the urine bag, they draw blood. They say only enough to maintain for the day, one day at a time. There’s the Good Cindy and the Bad Cindy. One is clear, informative, exact, the other vague, unsure. Somewhere, the physician makes his rounds. Who wouldn’t like to believe he’s only a few floors away, coming this way, bringing a world-view, a philosophy?
Snow
Falls, caked and heavy. Shadow, its acolyte.
The Brain Thinking of Return
Maybe it struck the brain just now, the idea of return, a kiss of electricity. Maybe the brain took a blowzy leap before it chanced losing its nerve. Or, maybe from the first breath of anesthesia, the brain’s been plotting the landscape of return as strictly as a cartographer. Maybe the images the just-opened eye sees were first interior, moving outward, the difference between in and out not what we think, but easier, more porous. The eyes open, they become yours, gradually, barely, brownly, from the blank world back, tiredly taking on their work. What an effort it is to be, to carve a clean line through the rubble.
To Think of Latitude and Longitude at the Same Time
To place oneself deliberately in the crosshairs. To set a special table for Thanksgiving, to wash up, to decorate the tree and take it down. To light even these few fires that call attention, in the dark. Holy Mary, snow queen, kite, flying with your flared bones over the entrance, I am having a revelation now. I imagine you making your choice. “How hard things are, already, how seasonal,” you complain to the angel, but then you say, “Okay, sure, why not have everything? Why not here?”
And the Form of Things is Fallen
Onto the bed, aching, onto the wheelchair, the walker, the railings at the toilet, the sitting up wobbling against the therapist, the slow clothes on and off, as demarcations. Flight with its maddeningly invisible wings marries the lumbering form of things and agrees not to give up, never to give up on each other, agrees to go home, to live in the same house, to eat kashi together while listening to the morning news, to complain bitterly about the government, to hope for better.(from Reunion, University of Wisconsin Press, 2007)