Body's in Trouble

This is an anatomy lesson, a body's dissection, the probing with cold instruments at the edges of the human soul.  You can see yourself in the reflective stainless steel.  You can see God too; s/he sits fitfully on the scalpel's invasive edge.  S/he tears me open with greedy curiosity--sanitized and precise--but forgets me easily to the infinity of time and the eternity of space.  

Out of the cool, light rain of the anaesthesia, I return to myself, to my being.  I am nothing save this discrete body with its dilemmas.  There are aches that recall everything, and mysterious pains that prove nothing, the half-sewn incisions made by (well-meaning) "doctors", my own bad decisions and the bruises they leave behind.

But there was a time before...

(This is the corny, old-movie moment when the body on the gurney moving from the surgeon's amphitheater through swinging doors and down a bleached bright hallway begins to dissolve.  This is a flashback, the black-and-white of the future dissolving like liquid into the technicolor of childhood.)

My skin was a testament to summer.  Naked and nine years old, I stood beside the green pool--its circulating currents turning round upon some mythical center like Muslims in Mecca or the stars, endangered, spinning round Polaris, fixed and finding direction through physics, even though 'direction' is itself an illusion.

It is June in Montana and despite the heat of the day, the creek recalls the winter.  The eddies, blue and green, that blur like watercolors on a page, disguise the blinding white of the blizzards--long subsided--but I know Jumping Creek is cold.  I anticipate the bracing chill the way we anticipate our lives:  a mixture of fear and excitement, assured of some pain, but believing--against logic--in something akin to pleasure.  I will dive into the water.  In spite of the frigid burn, its thousand needles, I will dive.  I will plunge into the pool disregarding the cold, or because of it.  I  am on that cusp when everything is a crucible of  my masculinity.  Everything is a test.