Oropharynx

Your scan shows nothing but shadows
yet the surgeon digs in, finds fifty
nodes under your skin,
not one with the right answer.
You think the nozzle’s broken
but actually your pipe’s split, Yikes,
he says, you should’ve come
before all this water wasted.
When all else fails, tie it off
and slap the vein. The intake
nurse taps her phone, showing
off her birthday party displays.
Another unthreads loops of tubing.
By week three you’re hunched over
in hallways, eating Cheerios
snuck from home that’s now
an infusion salon, recliners
wiped down daily
and snacks stacked in plastic drawers.
The parking’s free but you pay
with phlebotomies. He says,
You want your body back, you mean
the one you walked in with?
That first breath hurt,
that’s why the baby cries.
Gravity’s riptide. A heap of blooming
algae frosted with salt.
It was wet and warm in there
until something grabbed you
by the head and pulled.
 

Isolation Vault

Now that you’re closed in
you know how much
you like a windowed tree,
a steady heat source,
fortune folded into the canal
of a cookie you’re meant to break.
You like a warm blanket
straight from the oven,
the usual nurse closing gaps
in your gown, leaving the light on.
That time the machine got stuck?
nothing a crowbar can’t fix,
or so you thought.
You thought how the beloved’s face
swims after anesthesia,
how an infant tossed in the deep end
bobs back up. Like a bubble.
Like a bowl of peonies by the bedside.
By now they don’t look so good
though they like being licked
by sugar ants. When
the waiter comes carrying
a tray arrayed with surgical blades
you’re already buckled in
for a flight across water,
counting up change,
drinks mixed to dull the pain.

Informed Consent

Your ovaries are shot
but the questionnaire still wants
you to check the little box,
watch training videos enact
the usual scenarios—
organs packed in cellophane,
carnage in deep freeze.
The surgeon says tiny incisions
will unstick your tongue
but the robot needs to breathe.
The surgical table weirdly catty-corner,
your legs encased in pneumatic sleeves.
Mildly irked when they say
please “lay” back on the gurney.
You hover near the antimicrobial
laminar ceiling system,
a winged pupa
shmooshing into a cloud.
No air traffic control.
Stomach singing and softening agents.
When your frame’s stitched up
you wake remembering the mechanic
with a glandular condition
could eat six big Macs for lunch
and still fit under a Fiat.
You’re a bit leaky.
Later, your face locked down
in a mesh
with your name taped to it.
Open eye holes.
Eyes closed.
Rinsed and squeegeed.
Relief to hear the pain you feel
is supposed to be there.

Meditation (a cento)

I had come to the house, in a cave of trees
adorned with ferns,
the smell of crushed grass all around me
as sweet as I could bear.
I had meant to have but modest needs.
Yet see how I spread out and I cannot help it
like a grub suddenly exposed.
Inside me were many
black figures in a white landscape,
also pines, lawn, the bay, a blossoming apricot,
then several moths: then many
flowers, unrecognizable
with woolly leaves like tongues.
Then the elms. There marching
with the weight of a domed crown
drenched, knocking against the house.
Sometimes I lift a green lacewing
into a flushed, still sky.

Of course the point is to be hidden,
empty of complaint, forever
a mouth that has no moisture and no breath.
Because my throat clove to hunger,
I hid sometimes in my closet among my own clothes.
I thought, OK this shirt will clothe the other in me,
the unintelligible syllables.
I am its attachment or appendage.
I mean to say
that I’d temporarily died.
But I tell myself I’m safe. I remind myself.
In the bathtub, I examine my body,
blessed to be here in spite of
the rotting odor of need.

I should have begun with this: the sky
pouring itself over and over
though sometimes it is only gauze, unrolling
toward heaven still,
pink, of course, soft; a girl’s—
and you can imagine the face
all feathered out in clouds,
long thin arms stretched out
fence post to fence post.
Unrooted, she walks
as consciousness
estranged from the body,
looking down and seeing some image
of time on sand, mud, bits of shell, the moving
of her hips, her laughter, her will—
whatever suits her      she moves

Two hours before dawn. In the distance
the fields tilt to the sky. Though it is late,
the moon already down,
night covers the pond with its wing.
Late, you can hear the stars. And beyond them
high in the trees, cicadas weave
with their liquid voices.
This is how it always is.
I think of all my time,
who I am and what I’ve done
under a sky that never cared less.
It’s the same weight
before I heard it coming, and when it
split me apart.

Sources

Stanza 1: Louise Gluck, “Medusa”; Elizabeth Bishop, “Jeronimo’s House”; Ellery Akers, “Looking Around”; Robert Frost, “The Onset”; Emily Dickinson, #476; Naomi Replansky, “Housing Shortage”; Jane Kenyon: “Man Waking”; Alicia Ostriker, “volcano 1”; Alicia Ostriker, “the volcano and the covenant 5”; Robert Hass, “Interrupted Meditation”; Ellery Akers, “Letter to Her Sister: By the Carson River, Nevada, 1848”; “ Hayden Carruth, “This Decoration”; Ellery Akers: Letter to Her Sister: Wyoming, 1848”; Hayden Carruth, “Speaking for Them”; H.D., “Tribute to the Angels”; Ellery Akers, “Letter to Her Sister: Wyoming, 1848”; Ruth Stone, “Separate”; Elizabeth Bishop, “Large Bad Picture” Stanza 2: Jeff Oaks, “The Nest in Winter”; Sylvia Plath, “The Thin People”; William Butler Yeats, “Byzantium”; Steven Cramer, Clangings, pg 13; Ruth Stone, “Loss”; Galway Kinnell, “Telephoning in Mexican Sunlight”; Sylvia Plath, “The Arrival of the Bee Box”; Alicia Ostriker, “The Space of This Dialogue 4. Aperture”; Diane di Prima, “Brass Furnace Going Out: Song, after an Abortion”; Wisława Szymborska, “May 16, 1973”; Jack Gilbert, “Infectious”; Louise Gluck, “Mutable Earth”; Alicia Ostriker: “the volcano and the covenant 4” Stanza 3: Wisława Szymborska, “Sky”; Ellery Akers, “Long Island, 1952”; Ellery Akers, “Sky”; Robert Frost, “After Apple Picking”; Robert Hass, “My Mother’s Nipples”; Ted Kooser, “december 22”; Ted Kooser, “december 8”; Ted Kooser, “december 27”; Ted Kooser, “december 9”; Diane di Prima, “The Loba Recovers the Memory of a Mare”; Louise Gluck, “The Wild Iris”; Jane Kenyon, “Summer 1890: Near the Gulf”; Louise Gluck, “Scilla”; Ellen Bass, “Marriage”; Diane di Prima, “Apparuit” Stanza 4: Ted Kooser: january 23; Stevie Smith: “Pretty”; Ted Kooser: “december 2”; Louise Gluck: “The Pond”; William Stafford: “Touches”; Ted Kooser: “An August Night”; Lisel Mueller: “Why I Need the Birds”; Rumi (trans Coleman Barks): #1823; Rumi (trans Coleman Barks): #1823; Hayden Carruth: “Loneliness: An Outburst of Hexasyllables”; Rumi (trans Coleman Barks): #2266; William Stafford: “At the Bomb Testing Site”; Ellery Akers: “Advice from an Angel 5”; Jane Kenyon: “Prognosis”; Rumi (trans Coleman Barks): #1304

Music of the Spheres (a cento)

—for Galway

I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven—
let me sing
and scatter wheeling in great broken rings

O half moon—
you with the candle—
barren, empty, stone wild. Worn-away wild—

All goes onward and outward—and nothing collapses

These sonatas, these scores, tell me
whose face
shines back at itself
milky, simmering—

in the beginning
there

where the earth oozes up
one letter at a time. Pressing down
the blossom dust
the flesh-flowers
the almost imaginary bones

pressing lips to the edge of each syllable
smoothed or scribbled or cross-hatched everywhere

I can see
the huge broken letters
shining in their heaped-up hair

I see it, foolish and clear, and say it. Sometimes
a whole sentence gets through

shards and lumps
no bigger than a breath

Out of the words, the one
light comes out
that holds this great earth in the air

And then
a little hidden sympathy
floats towards me
in remembrance

of the beginning

Imagine it—

figs, lemons
canaries jouncing in jewelweed
built of these fistfuls of yellow

and all this universe
iridescent, watery

looked like gold bees, and then like pollen

Sources

Stanza 1: Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself #49”; Anne Sexton, “In Celebration of My Uterus”; William Butler Yeats, “The Wild Swans at Coole” Stanza 2: Sylvia Plath, “Thalidomide”; Camille Dungy, “Trophic Cascade”; Jack Gilbert, “Foraging for Wood on the Mountain” Stanza 3: Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself #6” Stanza 4: Julia Guez, “If Indeed I am Ill, Brother”; Galway Kinnell, “Under the Maud Moon”; Ted Kooser, “February 25”; Jill Dawson, “The Crossing” Stanza 5: Genesis; Diane di Prima, “The Stars Shine for Us” Stanza 6: Galway Kinnell, “Under the Maud Moon”; Raymond Carver, “The School Desk”; Galway Kinnell, “The Call Across…”; Galway Kinnell, “The Call Across…”; Galway Kinnell, “Little Sleeps-head in the Moonlight” Stanza 7: Naomi Shihab Nye, “Darling”; Mark Doty, “Lilies in New York” Stanza 8: Galway Kinnell, “The Path Among the Stones”; Galway Kinnell, “The Hen Flower”; Ellery Akers, “My Mother’s Decoupage” Stanza 9: Mona van Duyn, “Fear of Flying”; Naomi Shihab Nye, “Morning?” Stanza 10: Galway Kinnell, “In the Hotel of Lost Light”; Ted Kooser, “January 9” Stanza 11: Galway Kinnell, “Under the Maud Moon”; Ellery Akers, “The Dead”; Jack Gilbert, “Adulterated” Stanza 12: Galway Kinnell, “Under the Maud Moon”; Ann Pelletier, Letter That Never, page 21”; Ellery Akers, “What Rises in the Seat at Night Rises in Dreams”; Galway Kinnell, “Under the Maud Moon” Stanza 13: Galway Kinnell, “Under the Maud Moon” Stanza 14: Sylvia Plath, “Letter in November” Stanza 15: Ann Pelletier, Letter That Never, page 35: Ann Pelletier, Letter That Never, page 14; Mark Doty, “Door to the River” Stanza 16: Adrienne Rich, “A Woman Mourned by Daughters”; Mark Doty, “A Display of Mackerel” Stanza 17: Ellery Akers, “The Shouting Match with my Mother at Sixteen”