Years of Disease

1. If

if I had listened

if in thin blood I’d heard if I had

touched the ribs my body

bent if someone had if they had

listened

at night

the hallway fills with my dying’s force

of breath

if when I’d called

the doctor if the doctor had called sooner—

2. The Sky Through the Hospital Room Window

In the now-defunct maternity ward I wake

alone.

Some woman labored here

and, while she did, the waiting father scratched

a small square out of the privacy tint to reveal

a window onto a window. (I am within a room

within an atrium, and only through its roof shines through

the sky.)

Perhaps he used their house key, or a credit card, or the untrimmed nail on his thumb.

Perhaps the labor was long but

for his efforts I am now delivered

the pale and waxy light

of early May.

3. My Friend Thomas Writes to Me

You are missing the start of the beautiful days

4. The Doctors

Like clouds, the doctors pass

into and out of

my room.

The clouds ask, Where is your husband? Do you have any child?

They say, You are very sick—

But I do not feel this way. I feel alert,

as if more greatly challenged in my aliveness; I want to show them that I am more

than my failing breath and body.

My desire does not matter:

The body is so very sick—

A husband? A child?

I do not know when someone tells me—if someone ever tells me—what is wrong.

5. “If an Empyema Does Not Rupture, Death Will Occur”

Hippocrates wrote this, wrote of the ancient empyema in his Corpus,

his body of work, of the tender bodies millennia ago who had succumbed.

The tender lungs, the tender bodies.

This, the empyema, it is what has taken half my chest.

Does anyone ever tell me this?

But Hippocrates tried to cure. He was a doctor, a cloud

still in the early sky.

Two thousand years ago, he wrote the cure for empyema:

Peels of pomegranate Salt and silphium Oil, honey

Baths and radish skin Reeds and through them taken milk and wine

Cuckoo-pint root A hole unscrewed between the sixth and seventh ribs

6. …A Hole Unscrewed

The doctors come to my body. I look up at them,

into the clouds,

into the eyes

of the doctors. They wear glasses, tortoiseshell frames.

They make me sign on a slip of paper for the procedure,

for their cure.

I hesitate:

Isn’t it only natural to want a choice?

How desperately I want to think there is a choice—

There is no choice!

My body is so very sick.

So they come

and they make my back bare and clean.

They place my head upon my arms, my arms upon the table.

They press in behind me, they pull

a small, soft piece of me away from myself.

They place into me a large plastic tube, held into me

with thick black loops of thread.

They swirl away from me.

I am awake, watching.

Window away from my window:

O, there is the sterile sky.

7. Thomas Writes to Me

The goldfinches dart from the haystacks

8. Trapped Lung

Even in these early weeks of May I know

outside my room

the nights are full of bare and supple branches convulsing against a cool wind.

My breath does not expand against it—against my body—

The clouds have no edges, no restrictions in the sky. They are moved

by the wind.

They say my injured body is like a web around my lung,

like a rind around an orange.

Like the skin around a tree.

There are many similes.

Thomas, I think no simile now can save me—

9. That Night

I turn.

I wake.

The moon, like a large scarred thorax, moves through the atrium window

and into mine.

A cold and distant city exists, seemingly so far away,

with my neighbors within their own windows, also dying.

10. Trapped

I hear women—nurses—laughing outside my little window.

Their voices dart like goldfinches from haystacks.

How quick is joy,

it seems to me. How fleeting.

How easily it can be obscured, like a cloud passing over the sun.

The doctors come to me and unwind the tube that turns into my body.

They try to cure. They say it cures

most.

What fear I have…

I say very little, very quietly.

Without breath,

no thing, no living thing, exists without

agony.

11. Thomas Writes to Me

Season the farmers are out planting seed in some sun

12. Radiation

One only has to look through the little window at the light of the strange moon

to think of what it could mean.

But I do not ask what it means

for my body.

I am too scared, too much a coward.

I have never had a child yet, never been pregnant.

What does all of this mean for my body, for any not-yet child?

13. Thomas Writes to Me

A fly’s dark body on today’s split citrus breakfast: my still-life

14. A Shadow Comes After

Before all this, there was something else. Something good.

The moon

was not just shadow.

The walls here are now defunct. The paint peels.

The father’s nerves are long-forgotten. The mother who labored is older, their child

is so much older.

They are together, perhaps,

outside of a window and together, kneeling, in this first hard grass of May.

I watch my life, how it is now darkened.

How can I see these things any other way?

For the parents, the child, for my parents, for any child I would have, for me: All

the beloved will be dead one day

and, just one day before, they will have been alive!

What terrible pain…

Or my half-dead, tortured thorax, stuck

in unmoving shadow,

half-full

of cure that turns inside my turning body.

I cannot bear to look at my bandaged side, the tube

heavily unspooling from my body:

Not all suffering is physical.

But such pain, when it occurs, eclipses all else.

15. The Long, Sterile Hallways of the Hospital

I can hear a child screaming for his mother.

It is pitiful. We are pitiful:

but I am made more alert and struggle to be more alive

by the knowledge of such suffering.

How I cry for my own mother.

How I cry

alone, at night

when a cloud passes over the moon—

In the morning, I pass the child while I am in a wheelchair.

The nurse takes me to a room made black for the films

on which the radiologist looks for air.

The room is like a night sky

and the illuminated screens are like the moon.

So many similes.

The air

signifies the life

that once was in my lung—

But the doctor seeks the shadow.

16. “Many Bound Together”

In Greek, polysyndeton means many bound together.

Hippocrates would have known this meaning, when he lived.

17. Many Bound Together

When we all lived,

we died, all, too.

Many have died.

These are years of disease.

These are years of dirt,

and we buried them. In the distant cities,

still cold in May,

we buried our neighbors, who also had been dying. We are burying them, still.

Try to remember those days—

And if I listen

down the hospital halls,

someone cries out—

and someone plays a nocturne by Chopin—

18. “To Decorticate”

This means to peel, as in

to peel the web, the rind from the orange, the bark

from the tree.

Thus if the cure does not

cure,

the doctors say,

they will come and make my back open, they will peel the scars

away from my lung.

Once, they made my back bare and clean and once,

they put my arms upon the table.

They tell me that people die

upon this table.

I cannot listen to this!—

I remember I was by the sea, years ago,

and on the sand:

I peeled the skin away from a small, fragrant orange.

I fell asleep on the beach and the thoracic moon rose

from the ocean

into my small May window.

Now,

there are terrible, long periods of threat

and of vulnerability.

19. Code Blue

Into the firmament, the vault, the lid, the sky—out the code cries.

There is no laughter. The nurses’ hurried footsteps in the hallway pass

my room.

There are those things, those silent things, called Mercy and called Fortune and—

o, I forget my pain. My crying. See the moonlight. All these things alight on us,

but they do so without reason.

I, alive, turn over in my bed.

20. Sir William Osler

One of the best, they said, ever. One of the best

doctors

and he succumbed, too, to his lungs, to the empyema.

They drained him, like water to the clouds.

They resected his ribs.

He bled and he bled.

21. A Decortication

Before all of this, there was a day when the white birch was peeling its own skin

and turned the skin around a palette of paints:

white birch. Black eyes

peeling around the birch-bark. Black hound,

my beloved

dog.

There were days in the past where we would walk, and beside

the two of us the miles

of river pushed

loose spring ice over the dam.

I remember the day:

A frenzy overtook my dog, and she cried, wildly,

into the dark green thicket. There was a gray

wolf. I could not believe it, the first wolf I had ever seen: the size of it. Its fur.

I could not believe it: In the dark green thicket lay

the peeling corpse of a great gray wolf.

22. On Resurrection, Briefly

A trail of blood dragged across the earth for many days. For many days,

until it washed away, my dog pursued the scent,

a sort of questioning—

The wolf’s corpse

had disappeared.

How spontaneous is joy, and fear…

A sort of questioning: Will I die upon this table?

Will my corpse lie until the return?

The dead have left

their trails with me.

Will they fade in the seasons of rain?

I must forget these things

because, simply, so many children are born, the ones around me, and in this

I have found joy.

Will a child of mine ever be born?

I turn myself over in the hospital bed. Still

wanting—

23. In the Dark Green Thicket

Who could forget the size of a wolf?

We returned for many days, seeking it, and every day I saw spiders in the thicket,

and I realized:

They weave when there is a body Or when there is no body

They weave

From neither pleasure nor grief Simply movement

There will come a day

when my dog, too, will be lost

in the darkness after death.

The Earth will tilt as it always has, through early Spring again,

and the thorax of the spider makes its web

and will still spin—

What fear I have!

I lie alone upon the table.

24. Dupuytren’s Empyema

Like the others, Dupuytren was a doctor himself, surgeon to Napoleon.

He chose to die.

It is said

he said

that he preferred to die at the hands of God

than at those of a surgeon.

I want, desperately, for there to be a choice.

He died.

25. Thomas Writes to Me

Today behind me tinny wind—or maybe just a waxwings’ spat

26. The Night Before

I knew something was wrong, I knew so

barely breathing

I trimmed my fingernails at the edge of the sink.

27. An Elegy in Early May

Some elegies begin in nature,

even the late ones, which are unsure of themselves:

There is nothing left to do here.

We must wait

for spring’s seeds to grow,

and then we can return to praise.

Others have died.

It is unspeakable,

but the cedar waxwings are perfect, still.

There is one bird, no, there are two or three,

there are dozens, then,

in the branches with the first bare brown buds of May.

And their song is like a flute to the souls,

and their enduring congregation bestows dignity to this praise.

So many others have died. My neighbors have died;

they were

ones whom I knew, and died while I lay here, in the window of my hospital,

and for them

I cry only once.

I cry twice.

28. Into the Far Pasture

I cannot imagine dying while

so lucid;

this is what frightens me.

There is a small place within my consciousness

where the tint has been removed,

and through this little window

I, dying, will still see:

Blinking against the light, the knowledge

of dying

for hours.

Before all this,

in the better days,

when the distant cities were less cold,

when, with my breath, spring’s first-winged birds alighted on the river,

where the water cascaded over the dam,

my neighbors were alive under a soft moon.

In the religion of my mind,

the Earth opens itself into the Far Pasture.

Thomas, I do not fear this.

My beloved hound and I go into the pasture together.

I will find solace there. Some days, I am reminded

Thomas, I am so fortunate—

Others died.

Thomas, when it is the end, have someone play the joyful nocturne—

Have someone laughing—

Emily Dorff

Years of Disease