Waiting Room
It’s 9:00am when the man begins to write
with sound, as anyone would, when his sole
stimulus is the hum of lights, the curved complexity of spine
and skull, hanging bones, the topographical map of man’s
anatomy pinned to the wall. He clicks the back end of a pen
and hovers above the page. Which element of salt turns ice
to water? he wonders to the pad. Square, an uninspired crystal.
And there’s plenty of it out there, clearing the drive. Two old
women from the Philippines, he thinks, maybe Japanese –
with receding hairlines, he notes, always conscious of his own –
engage in rehabilitation: scapular reduction, external rotation
while stretching a red band. Snap out of it, he blinks
and tells himself, Sound – write with it. Script the tune
of the blue rays pulsing through the bones of his hand,
which has swollen to the size of a hand in a glove, bulging
around the knuckle. He was lubing the channels of poetic flux
by writing with taste in the kitchen, when something sinister
put his fist through the wall to a stud. Now he writes lefty
and has forsaken taste for sound: thud of a fist on stud, quick pop
of cracking knuckle. The intern says to the woman with a bum
shoulder, “Once we get you taking care of your son again,
then you’ll be home free!” What fortune, it seems, to be
casted for a broken hand, to see the tentacles of light floating
from the fixtures, to recall smashing fluorescent lamps
in the gully by the tracks with childhood friends, the ghost
of light rising as long tubes popped and splintered
against oak trunks and birch. To see behind drywall
and into structure, to see beyond shadow to substance,
to nurse another cold, or a broken bone, to live briefly
in the waiting room, not counting beads for a best friend,
not covering one’s face hoping she will breathe again freely,
concerned purely with his own pain, grateful for such trouble.