59 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
59 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
---
|
|
---
|
|
|
|
<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>
|