Coma
How the body, suspended, becomes memorial
to what it used to house: wooden cross
starring the roadside; silver jet trail
expanding as it fades, underscoring then canceling the clouds’
inscrutable calligraphy. There is no shared language
between us and the night. When the truck
struck the convertible’s side and sent us reeling
through oncoming cars, glinting waves
miraculously parting, what say did I have
over the words flung from me? As if I
broke to nothing but the teleology
of circumstance, flotsam of whatever random
predestination traffics with us, tipping the scales
so we come up yes, and she,
no--Tell me, as you wait
in your mother’s hospital room
gone too dark to separate shadow
from body, while in the hall they debate
the ethics of respirators, of splitting the chest
to press that beat back into the hypothetically
stalled heart, where was she, as the scan
inked mourning around the brain’s
one lit wing? What sound does the soul make
leaving the body? And how distinguish it
from the machine’s pump and sigh, from steel
crashing against steel? But we walked
away from our wreck, days before the call
that she’d been hit; wobbly as new fawns
on the highway shoulder, grit of gravel like ground
eggshell beneath our feet, in that moment
nothing mattered, not whether we’d been targeted, spared,
overlooked, next to the crystal of broken bottle necks,
beer cans’ silver spillage shimmering
in the ravine’s long grass. As if that lovely green
wasn’t our vision of this earth
already fraying. As if living
each day in the warmth of what would blind
if directly faced, we could keep from turning
to that brilliant, unforgiving knowledge, that the light
has never revolved around us, despite our picturing the sun
as a daily, gifted gesture. On southern
highways, styrofoam crosses mark where car
hit tree: loss hammered to a precise station,
like the one floret pricked red at the center
of Queen Anne’s Lace, those stiff umbels of foam lining
the shoulder, as if in each heart the compass foot dug
too deeply in. What’s a circle but a line
that can’t let go? The names are what’s blurred
at 65 miles per hour, and everything said is a radius spun
away from that point everything
points to, when the machine is turned off and she
breathes, or doesn’t, with whatever’s left of what we’d
call her will. The last of the late
afternoon light blows through the pines edging
the highway. Any two points
on a circle form an arc: directionless, and so
eternal. But the sun’s dropping behind the horizon
of her window; the linear keeps breaking
through the visible world, denying the consolation of the whorls
you keep rubbing into her palm as her heart flickers
on the monitor. No comfort left, only
this: What took her breath
wasn’t yours given back, what tonight you’d give
not to see her heart’s handful of electric dust
falling in line across that screen.
From Biogeography (Tupelo 2008). First published in Poetry.
How the body, suspended, becomes memorial
to what it used to house: wooden cross
starring the roadside; silver jet trail
expanding as it fades, underscoring then canceling the clouds’
inscrutable calligraphy. There is no shared language
between us and the night. When the truck
struck the convertible’s side and sent us reeling
through oncoming cars, glinting waves
miraculously parting, what say did I have
over the words flung from me? As if I
broke to nothing but the teleology
of circumstance, flotsam of whatever random
predestination traffics with us, tipping the scales
so we come up yes, and she,
no--Tell me, as you wait
in your mother’s hospital room
gone too dark to separate shadow
from body, while in the hall they debate
the ethics of respirators, of splitting the chest
to press that beat back into the hypothetically
stalled heart, where was she, as the scan
inked mourning around the brain’s
one lit wing? What sound does the soul make
leaving the body? And how distinguish it
from the machine’s pump and sigh, from steel
crashing against steel? But we walked
away from our wreck, days before the call
that she’d been hit; wobbly as new fawns
on the highway shoulder, grit of gravel like ground
eggshell beneath our feet, in that moment
nothing mattered, not whether we’d been targeted, spared,
overlooked, next to the crystal of broken bottle necks,
beer cans’ silver spillage shimmering
in the ravine’s long grass. As if that lovely green
wasn’t our vision of this earth
already fraying. As if living
each day in the warmth of what would blind
if directly faced, we could keep from turning
to that brilliant, unforgiving knowledge, that the light
has never revolved around us, despite our picturing the sun
as a daily, gifted gesture. On southern
highways, styrofoam crosses mark where car
hit tree: loss hammered to a precise station,
like the one floret pricked red at the center
of Queen Anne’s Lace, those stiff umbels of foam lining
the shoulder, as if in each heart the compass foot dug
too deeply in. What’s a circle but a line
that can’t let go? The names are what’s blurred
at 65 miles per hour, and everything said is a radius spun
away from that point everything
points to, when the machine is turned off and she
breathes, or doesn’t, with whatever’s left of what we’d
call her will. The last of the late
afternoon light blows through the pines edging
the highway. Any two points
on a circle form an arc: directionless, and so
eternal. But the sun’s dropping behind the horizon
of her window; the linear keeps breaking
through the visible world, denying the consolation of the whorls
you keep rubbing into her palm as her heart flickers
on the monitor. No comfort left, only
this: What took her breath
wasn’t yours given back, what tonight you’d give
not to see her heart’s handful of electric dust
falling in line across that screen.
From Biogeography (Tupelo 2008). First published in Poetry.