I’ve said before it’s like getting home— been sitting with my book and wine and fraction of attention always scanning for more of the habit-pain grown common the past few years—the stitch or ever-aching fold where my appendix is, but it isn’t that, per the ultrasound and CT altogether unremarkable—but even before that, a (how to put this?) deep wrongness every clinician I’d consulted had chalked to the usual curse, and even my mom, who herself suffered along a nearby way—and of course then I didn’t know the typical chain: a girl with such pain is likely to ask her mother, to whom the pain is normal: so we’re trained by a theory of normalcy and doctors’ indifference that we should just stop looking now—what’s there to follow up on? this is your life now, this your body now—what I mean is: the pain notches up and my self-scan catches the change (blooms of small nausea, a cramp, a sharp) and half of me, of course, needs help: heat, limp NSAIDs, dread rest, ebb thoughts; and the other gathers a weird satisfaction: I recognize the courses and crude paths of pain, spreading, as surely my own as my breath, voice, memory, or usual gait.
after Dickinson’s first Master Letter, ca. spring 1858 It, like a mother, tells me no more of that tonight. Time to rest. Time enough for time to slow enough that, looking flat at the day, I can’t say what was done, though I’m sure I did something. I’ll find it around here. I remember I looked at the table, cooked slow, walked not long enough that I felt I should be fatigued, but was, then pressed myself (sorry for myself) on the bed like a sweater to dry all sodden afternoon. The image implies I’ve been washed clean: true, my mind’s scraped against the rock. Stroked its stains clearer. What’s left on erasure of such habits of self: gaunt sites, drafts like oil stains on cotton not fully erased. You might see how I was, but I can’t ape it now.
So you’re the thing that’s wrong with me, your muscle groups coded red, purple, and blue, and I, quick and covert, take a picture of you, with a mental note: there, my nemesis among the ragged plastic of the pelvis, which puts me in mind of old banks of snow— that lean away from white, toward taupe—and also, a little, a kitchen rag used until holes eclipse the cloth itself. While I wait for a doctor we regard each other, coolly, between soft table, stained carpet, and corner shelf. First I imagine you my own, then focus on the names: sacrum, arch, and wings; next I picture you a skull, solemn bones of a piece, sockets then not for sight but poor hips (mine uneven—some tissue’s torn, I’m told), the foramina acting, instead, as eyes; now, unlike the head, you’re a link between parts: light doesn’t emerge in a dash from the crown but pools—heavy, heavy—sends shoots to the thighs and belly maybe. But mostly you’re as stuck on your shelf as my pelvis in me, one place, held tight, wishing to scatter like chalk on dry paint, which can’t hurt anymore.
It served as pretext for the walk, see—I took 27 cents and my baseball cap to leave the late-afternoon house soaked with light where the blinds don’t meet, or not enough. We need the garlic for the pizza sauce we have most weeks; I need the garlic-walk to get me out; I need the pizza because it’s good, we make it, and it helps some ways with the pain: for comfort, pleasure, and the time making asks—the yeast and rise and proof and rise as mysterious relief from the hardship of watching my ache become a household problem: I mean that I hate shorthand phrases like it’s back and I hurt not for their failure to communicate but because they indicate an environmental pressure. This pain, that is, has become—like climate—a covering about which we note something’s coming or storm broke, meaning it affects all who live here much the same; it changes the mood, the tenor, the whole house’s color so much that in and out of me pull together. Now I mean this walk as a meager apology. I can still bring you an object that means little and lot: cheap head of cloves as tiny proof of love. I walked, and it hurt and helped me both, then, slower, came back, having relieved you briefly of the weather.
I’m taking it, always, too personally. I walked, Stendhal wrote after his palpitations, with the fear of falling, though this appears to have been common to his life experience, that mental would merge so close with concrete. “When a thought takes too strong a hold of me,” he said once, “I fall down.” Though it’s melodramatic, I feel what he means. We suffer, faced with the aspect of suffering for longer than the easy moment. Laocoön, Icarus, Christ, so forth. Noli me tangere. If a glance is safe, a stare can destabilize; if a grayscale or bleary reproduction of the object is safe, contact—the body, body, and gallery—is too much, closer than you thought you’d come. Once, my student wrote that our pain in response to art is mobile—we carry it with us; we may mediate its aftermath elsewhere—but Velázquez’s Crucified Christ, when we walk off, “still suffers, even with no observer.” Maybe the syndrome, then, is the hardship of compulsion to leave while still attached. How, though, to sever? You could call it prudent to lift the intensity. Some pains stay all day before I come back next night. (They are, after all, mine.) If I felt less, I reasoned as a kid in tall grass crying at a dead thing I imagined as Dürer’s hare, it might be less embarrassing—this being alive.
Emma Aylor is the author of Close Red Water, winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, AGNI, Poetry Northwest, the Yale Review Online, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She lives in Lubbock, Texas.
Scanning electron microscope images by Anne Weston, Francis Crick Institute.
From the Wellcome Trust Collection——Drosophilla eyes, Diatom frustule, Drosophila leg, Pancreatic cancer cell, White cells and platelet, Blood clot with crenated red cells
