--read a poem now.
This is a poem about being sick and going to Chinese--
going to a Chinese physician.
And it's very satisfying just from a magical point of view,
because Chinese medicine is so ornate and elaborate.
And they mix up the medicines while you wait, and they throw
locust bodies and chop up snake skins, and they mix it up,
and they wrap it up, and you take it home.
This is very satisfying just in terms of potent potion
qualities of it.
And so that's what it is about, my Chinese doctor.
It's called Medicine.
The black hair of my Chinese doctor gleams like combed ink
as he leans over his desk with quick pen strokes,
writing my prescription in the lingo of the I Ching,
characters so intricate and strange,
the page looks like a street lined with sand pans
and pagodas, rickshaws gliding through the palace gates,
bearing Szechuan take out to the Qing.
Daydreaming comes easy to the ill.
Slowed down to the speed of waiting rooms,
you learn to hang suspended in the wallpaper,
to drift among the magazines and plants,
feeling a strange love for the time that might be killing you.
Two years ago, I was so infatuated
with my lady doctor, Linda, I wanted
to get better just to please her,
and yet to go on getting worse, to keep her leaning towards me
with her sea green eyes and stethoscope, asking,
does that hurt?
Does it hurt?
Yes, it hurts so sweet, it hurts exquisitely, it hurts real good.
I feel as if I read it in some bible for the ill,
that suffering itself is medicine and to endure enough
will cure you of anything, so I want
more injury and repair, an ulcer and a migraine, please.
I want to suffer like my mother, who said once
following a shot, her face joyful as the needle entered,
that she felt a train had been injected straight into her vein.
Day after day, to see her sinking
through the layers of our care was
to learn something delicious about weakness,
as if she had discovered the train was bound somewhere,
as if the conductor had told everyone on board
they never had to bear the weight of being strong again.