2001/scars

Scars make your body
more interesting was
always one of my favorite
lines.
Whose was it?
The surgeon worked for hours
extra, thinking I feared
the incision.
It wasn’t so much
the scar I dreaded
but that the incision
slowed recovery.
It was being put to
sleep, the way they do
with dogs and cats.
Or so it felt.
I knew it was not
their intent
to euthanize.
But it was that phrase
put to sleep, phrases
everything to a poet.
That went into the
chart, the poetry.
Later I wondered
how the detail had
effected the care
I received.
Never mind, that’s
not the point.
It was surrendering
my life, like a glove
slipped off for dinner,
to people I had
never seen.

And the metallic
room that was sure
to come,
they always frighten me,
alien environments
I have to live in
before I can adapt,
before my eye peruses
the shapes,
telling my finger
what the textures
might have been.

And the cold linoleum
corridors, they had
always made me sad,
the closed rooms where
life slipped out
no matter how hard
the family tried to
hold on.

I feared all that,
being in a space
where the things that
healed me had such trouble
entering the room,
the gap between
healing and medicine.

11/18/01