I'd like to read a new poem now continuing
on this theme of language as a means of control and salvation,
at least that concept.
In this poem, the persona or the speaker has almost died.
She's had a near-death experience.
And in the poem you'll hear her trying
to deal with that experience through language
and using language as a defense, as a means of control.
And the poem moves on and eventually she
has a moment of realization about the limitations
of language.
Losing It.
You feel a hardcore blankness gain the upper hand
while the world turns to glittering silica, crinkles
and rolls up like a rented movie screen.
The air whirs.
Surely the golden fan that halos saints' heads
is rising from your spine.
Before your lips hit the floor, you recognize divestment
and want to dicker, please heaven with the slippage,
but find yourself dismissed.
Getting lost was once adventure.
As a kid, you and a kindly aunt played at it,
boarding any bus that puffed along no matter where it went.
Your aunt was mindful of the transfers
which saw you home intact.
Where is she now, with her calm tokens and cerebral naps,
when your brain's become a Byzantine cathedral flooded
with the stuff of sump and dumpster?
Its frescoes, memories confetti into the mortal sludge.
From domes filleted and boned with light,
the impounded soul looks down.
You wake up dumb as something fallen off a turnip
truck into a new dark age.
That petrified river around your legs must be your skirt.
What month, what day?
The doctor asks.
Mortified, you log the answer, a book dense as a headstone
to your lips.
I don't know, you whisper.
If brain were body, yours would be unmuscled
and standing in the buff.
The ooze of stupefaction extends for blocks,
and you have nothing but a single cotton
swab which with to clean it up.
Above the bed like a silk in a filmy sarong,
his head on a plate of light, Christ
sinks into a blue plush cross.
Pain was never so fey.
Heroic yet decorative, he is the way we wish death to be.
How well he embodies our need for pleasantry.
The oxygen is delicious as champagne.
You wish to express this dim epiphany.
You'd like to binge on the fidgety past,
but thoughts sigh slow as elevators from cell to cell,
and words, words are snow crystals
to be grown from vapor.
Outside, the setting sun dips a straw into the trees
and drinks their green.
This time you're lucky.
You've lost nothing to speak of, a contact, a way of seeing.
And thinking back on what happened,
you imagine the brain as Byzantine cathedral
flooded with the stuff of sump and dumpster.
Its frescoes, memories confetti into the mortal sludge.
From domes filleted and boned with light,
the impounded soul looks down.
Then you discard the flood which was a kind of comfort,
let go the pan-religious romance of the soul.
And what's left, a state that's strictly -ex and -un.
Not this, not that, the ne plus ultra of losing
track: a nothing so engulfing I had
to hide behind the second person to address it as
though I spoke of someone else.
I remember my mother folding my aunt's best blue pajamas
on the empty drawer of her dresser in intensive care.
If there's a soul, it's such a clingy rayon casing,
deflating almost to absence when creased in layers of tissue.
From the high ground of health and self-control,
I issued orders to try.
Her lids, pinned by ether, strained as she complied.
Squeezing her hand I hadn't held since childhood,
I wanted to forget myself and beg her to awaken.
Come back no matter where you're headed, the voice inside me
said.