Sunday Evening (and other poems)

Sunday Evening

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.

for this pain denies me–

                              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.

Anatomical Model in the Examination Room

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.

Short Walk with Garlic in Pocket

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.

Stendhal Syndrome

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.