---
date: 2019-11-01
weight: 5
---

<div class="verse">I'm no good at images, only words,
and yet for days after surgery,
as anesthesia and countless
    milligrams, milliliters, millions of
drugs leave my system,
I'm lousy with visions,
each lousy with meaning.

I lay in bed, unable to move,
struggling to keep my eyes open;
I know that if I close them,
    I'll be lost, I'll be lost, I'll be
mired in waking dreams,
coherent visions with all the logic
of that paler side of consciousness.

Perhaps the veil here
is still too thin and vague,
the pool too clear, the monsters too scary
    too lean, too mean, too hungry, or
perhaps I was too close to death
to come away totally unscathed,
too close to completely survive.

    It's as though, laying here,
    stinking of hospital,
    I'm seeing emotions play out,
        Scene after scene, scene after scene,
    anxiety shown in heaps of discarded entrails,
    hope in the ceaseless ratcheting of gears,
    determination in the marching of feet.

If I were an artist, perhaps
I could hope to touch these images,
but as it is, every word falls short,
    too vague, too inexact, too tight to
hope to explain something so vast
by the very act of attempting to reproduce;
I can only hint from the margins.

That poetry can accomplish what prose cannot
in its economy of motion
is attractive to me, here in recovery -
    so tired, so tired, so tired - so
maybe I can hope to express the dire import
of these visions dancing behind closed lids,
or at least remind myself on rereading.

Even now, a week out,
I'm starting to lose touch with the visions,
I can almost touch them if I squint,
    lie real still, don't move now, but
even then, a shadow of the substance...
I'm starting to consign to memory
that which was probably memory to begin with.</div>
