left bleeding, bruised, and blistered, looking back at history

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now it is time to understand more, so that we may fear less."
--Marie Curie


"The Piano Speaks"

For the musicians staying at McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA

I am the mental hospital piano and I have seen hands.
Yes, you would call them hands, but I call them night-creatures
clasping chords in their teeth, translucent spiders cooing dawn home.
I've been touched by black boil-fettered fingers fat as tarantulas,
let me tell you about the spiders I've seen…

These are not hands, these are sky-scouting web-weavers.
These are not hands, these are teeth and eyes, and fingers like legs,
running, jumping, leaving, they are the quiet legs of children standing after being left,
they are the hospital-socked shuffling arrivals at 2 a.m. come to sleep in aluminum beds.
I have heard them speak in the language of pressed flowers; take me home.

And I remember every single last one of them:
Shamanistic surgeons, they tore music out of me with a rusty knife.
Dogs the color of urine, they howled hymns
in neon hospital moonlight. Heroin-blooded teenagers who wet the bed
they were so terrified of their hallucinations, they smoked me instead
and got higher than Jesus. I remember those towering monuments to loneliness
you call hands—they were peacocks spreading in front of me
and I saw their coats of bruises, they sang like the dying,
sang like a choir of prophets in jail, sang like mothers to children,
sang like they knew I had snow in my ribcage
and they weren't going to leave my side until I cracked open
like the pomegranate sky I was and poured out white seeds of heaven.

They wanted me honest. They liked me honest which is to say I was broken.
Nobody on staff fixed my raspy keys.
My notes remained sour and they played me like loving:
unlearned, without a how-to-book—played me solemn,
played me like hyenas laughing, like praying, like tortoises making at loving,
slow and fevered and with their eyes closed.
They were dirty, with scratched knees and beautiful toothy smiles
and sunglasses in the daytime, and though some were old, they were all ancient,
they were all legends for sleeping in hell while others walked through and got out.
They played symphonies that tore-down the walls
so drugged up hall-walkers fled their loneliness and joined in the fever.
They played onetime, completely improvised, endless and sky-scraping AIDS cures,
they played healing and they tore off their tourniquets for me to kiss
their bloody wildfires.

I have never belonged to opera-houses or your mother's cushy living room.
I live with those who bang daylight out of moondust,
now you tell me how you do that unless you are built of magic.
They study their own burning bodies.
They transcribe smoke signals and tear the lightning
from their throats like alley-cat cries.
I have heard five-tongued creatures smash sunrise into pulp.
I have seen rhododendrons blossom thunderously
with the quiet hope and hunger of living and dying
as they play and bloom and smash and burn.
And you call them hands,
you call them hands.
--Shira Erlichman


"The Surgeon at 2 a.m."
The white light is artificial, and hygienic as heaven.
The microbes cannot survive it.
They are departing in their transparent garments, turned aside
From the scalpels and the rubber hands.
The scalded sheet is a snowfield, frozen and peaceful.
The body under it is in my hands.
As usual there is no face. A lump of Chinese white
With seven holes thumbed in. The soul is another light.
I have not seen it; it does not fly up.
Tonight it has receded like a ship's light.

It is a garden I have to do with --- tubers and fruit
Oozing their jammy substances,
A mat of roots. My assistants hook them back.
Stenches and colors assail me.
This is the lung-tree.
These orchids are splendid. They spot and coil like snakes.
The heart is a red bell-bloom, in distress.
I am so small
In comparison to these organs!
I worm and hack in a purple wilderness.

The blood is a sunset. I admire it.
I am up to my elbows in it, red and squeaking.
Still it seeps me up, it is not exhausted.
So magical! A hot spring
I must seal off and let fill
The intricate, blue piping under this pale marble.
How I admire the Romans ---
Aqueducts, the Baths of Caracalla, the eagle nose!
The body is a Roman thing.
It has shut its mouth on the stone pill of repose.

It is a statue the orderlies are wheeling off.
I have perfected it.
I am left with and arm or a leg,
A set of teeth, or stones
To rattle in a bottle and take home,
And tissues in slices--a pathological salami.
Tonight the parts are entombed in an icebox.
Tomorrow they will swim
In vinegar like saints' relics.
Tomorrow the patient will have a clean, pink plastic limb.

Over one bed in the ward, a small blue light
Announces a new soul. The bed is blue.
Tonight, for this person, blue is a beautiful color.
The angels of morphia have borne him up.
He floats an inch from the ceiling,
Smelling the dawn drafts.
I walk among sleepers in gauze sarcophagi.
The red night lights are flat moons. They are dull with blood.
I am the sun, in my white coat,
Grey faces, shuttered by drugs, follow me like flowers.
--Sylvia Plath


"The Tulips"
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage ----
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free ----
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their colour,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I hve no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.
--Sylvia Plath


"The Snowy Day"
The last time I saw you, we met for coffee on a snowy day.
Outside the window of the coffee shop, the snow fell silently

& heavily, the traffic on Coldspring Lane blurred & vague,
each car a cumbersome dream vehicle plowing comically into eternity.

But there you were, real as day, drinking a real cup of coffee.
You were back from India, you had slept for two days, the coffee

tasted wonderful, you said. You had flown to a mountain monastery
to find in prayer & silence what you could not find in the everyday,

taking only a few books, a change of clothes, because for too long you
had carried your life like two suitcases heavy enough to kill you.

When it snows, everything is light & dark at the same time. Black coffee
in a white cup, the hours leaked away, until our cups were empty,

the afternoon gone. Then a kiss on the cheek, a door opening out
into the cold, & I was walking away, up a slippery snowy hill
nothing at all

like your mountain & so little to hold onto. That night the snow fell
& fell & fell, erasing every landmark, quieting the world for a while.

Later, after you died, I had a dream. The phone was ringing.
It was you, your voice, on the other end of the line, laughing

as you said, "Beth, it's Greg. I'm in the hospital. I'm not dead."
--Elizabeth Spires


"Spring and All"
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast -- a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines --

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches --

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind --

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined --
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance -- Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken
--William Carlos Williams


"While You Are in the Hospital"
At home, I think I see small pools of blood
forming in the corners of the bathroom ceiling,
but they are clumps of ladybugs, having found
their way in through the old wood of this leaning
house. They are slow and silent as they mount
each other, wrap their spindly legs around, cling.

In the hospital, beneath the syncopation
of intercoms and monitoring machines,
there is a silence: a woman in a room down
the hall contemplating her amputation, snow-
stooped trees through your window, fear.

Here, mail arrives daily: merchandise
sales, conference announcements, friends
sending cheer. I sort it into piles to keep,
recycle, discard. I think of love I've left,
and lost, and never known.

If I could really love, I would take away
these tubes dripping lipids and glucose
into your blood. I would liquefy the things
you love and flood them through your veins:
our sleeping dogs' rhythmic breathing, huge
orange trumpets of the amaryllis we thought
would never bloom, the crunch of the gravel
road coming home. If I could really love,
I would climb onto your narrow back
and wrap myself around, guarding like
a ladybug, or Achilles' mighty shield.
--Laurie Cooper


"December: Revisiting My Old Isolation Room"
Lit window--
I know you're still up
there
(in the past)
where I left you

Scrawny starlings building
out of nothing hopeless shelter
in the snowy corner of
that window gone abruptly dark

I freely stand here
watching
while you burn
unheard
among the screaming, the

zombies, the pacers, the shit-fingerpainters and furious
nocturnal soliloquists

A bone-freezing wind blows. My mother
always left a shot of whiskey out
for Santa Claus, someone confides
quietly
close to my ear
twenty years ago...

I think someone had lighted a candle for me
I am sure of it
with so few plausible causes
to justify the current
and remarkably convincing
impression of one of the normal
with which I now (most days) present. But

the unvisited

in dark churches,
by their families now
unmentioned

wind, cold wind, they blow the candles out and haunt Noel.
--Franz Wright


"Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside that sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul--it was a consequence of grammar. And so was God, because as soon as there's a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to I don't know, and that's what God is. It's what you don't know--the dark, the hidden, the underside of the visible, and all because we have grammar, and grammar would be impossible without the FoxP2 gene; so God is a brain mutation, and that gene is the same one birds need for singing. So music is built in, Glenn said: it's knitted into us. It would be very hard to amputate it because it's an essential part of us, like water."
--Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood


"Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more."
--Annie Dillard, "The Stunt Pilot"