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.

 

— Jim Davis