The Laying-On of Hands

This body,
naked
on the table--prone, stiff, pale,
almost blue--is waiting.
Having lost
the blush of modesty,
the dignity of religion--
we would call this
a cadaver, were it not trembling.

See how it shivers,
like water wrestling
with bad memories
or skin rippling,
anticipation
of the healing
touch...that does
not
come.

Peel off every label then open every can in the pantry...

a

man

can

be either a closer or an

opener

neither

makes

much difference.  He is a

peculiar

creature, a body invaded with 

urgency

naked he looks

like

a different man

someone

strange

isolated

a man waiting

on

the sublime eventuality of the

nothingness

gangLia

My nerves at night
were trained on others,
the straining of telepathy.
The silence of their thoughts
oppressed me; like monsters
their villainy was constructed
from common objects,
faintly outlined,
in a darkened room.

The day comes like a siren,
in hot pursuit.  She is made of helium,
her voice as high as angels,
rising, diminishing.
She is about to disappear.
My nerves bristle; the skin
(once thin) is made of needles.
Excite me and the balloon of you
POPS!
Whats left?  A broken condom,
a puddle of nerves.

My nerves have been highways,
and railways, and random
jangled, jack-knife paths.
They have pursued phantoms in blue
forests filled with the nocturnal.
There is the danger I have
mistaken for life and the life
I have taken--stupidly--for granted.

And now as the ganglia
retreat--stung and humbled--
they wither
like a parasitic vine
wrapped around the host
(which it has killed).  And still
the net of neurons comforts me
a quilt against the shade.

The patchwork pieces--
the batting, the lining, the skin--
are held together in constellations,
tiny pins pushing through
some cosmic acupuncture.

Night falls
again.  The ganglia ignite.
This bed becomes
a lake of fire; the sky is crowded.
There are one hundred thousand eyes--
our gods, our tricks, our ancestors--
unblinking,
rapt as taxidermy,
looking down.

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. 

Bone Structure

This is an acreage of blue, alfalfa flowering, a flood that covers the contours of the land, and suggests what is underneath.  She has good bone structure.  When the wind comes, blue and green argue for prominence.  Her skirt is shimmering rayon in summer light.  Something, invisible, is happening.  In winter, snow does something similar, like linen sheets defeating her sexuality.  And, with time will come the fabric's thinning, parchment wearing to crepe and tissue.  The ice blue of spring's creeks, the burnt red of autumn leaves, these colors puncture this thin veil of winter.  The old woman's blood is just below the surface, like the alfalfa, like the wheat.  The landscape remembers, like her features, framed by the long strands of her hair, spun cotton, bleached.  The sapphires of her eyes are still bright, but fading, chalk from the bluffs bubbling up in the flat lands, killing the possibility in the land.  Possibility in the land, you want to know and command the fecund mystery of seasons.  Her breasts, her thighs, the flat belly anticipates her desire, the desire she evokes in men, evoked when she was young and her flesh and fat was flushed with warm blood.  Summer is still humming, the hidden voice in the alfalfa.  There is a secret beauty built on the bone structure of the land.  

Lie down, lady fair, lie down naked and let the wet marshes absorb you.  The tendrils of your hair and the roots of tree and weed intermingle.  Your body is the cresting hill, the coulee's cleft.  What will be left of you?  The seasons turn and tease and please you.  You return.  The landscape personifies your beauty, remembering, with a shiver, your bone structure.

Physical Therapy

You weigh,
easily,
more than a horse
even with one leg
sawed off at the knee,
the obscene ham
protruding
from your cutoff sweats
on the seat of your wheelchair;
it flops from side to side,
flailing, dodging the drool
(failing)
that drips
from the gaping space
where your smile would be
if you had teeth.

Body in Landscape

The same road snaking along the same contours of the same mountain, the colors are indelible. Nothing changes. From where the brilliant teal of the waves crash and shatter like glass on the black rocks, to the confusion brought on by rain and elevation--the profusion of greens and the primeval, fairy-tale flowers that invade all of one's senses--this place retains. Imagine returning in five-year intervals, your body--for brief respite--pasted in this landscape and thus analyzed (internally) by the factor of change. One might think that in this repetition one would uncover continuity and context; after all, this body is the same body moving through the same landscape. Everything and everyone keeps their familiar names. Instead, there is neither comfort nor calm, this series of returns merely stirs up more contrast and consideration. Memories measure all experience and so-called facts react with and against ideas that are fleeting, ideas that are coveted, ideas that are etched in stone. The current is a combination of things: past obstructions, whispered breezes, eddies that like labyrinths lead nowhere. The present is a package never fully opened. Thus, one knows the landscape (knows one's own body as well) from the distance of one's associations. The purity of the first encounter, defrayed as it is from the investment of memory and the trembling of expectation, is impossible to recover. There is nothing essentially anything (tragic, liberating, superior) about this state of affairs. It is simply that; and one goes on walking--as best one can--through the landscape.

So this my fate,
to lie in state
a straw mann
in a varnished crate.