More on: illness

Becoming involved in a poem, allowing the lines to unfold, not knowing if there’s going to be a surprise, a turn, or deepening—this is very similar to being with a patient or family as a chaplain when I don’t have all the answers. Part of my job is to sit with them in uncertainty. It’s a big white space.

We cannot see our loved ones, shut into hospitals / like mysterious shrines, taken out alive or dead. // They close our eyes. We have no say in whether / we breathe or not.

You are not here. / Just this precious, flawed body, briefly home / to your soul.

“Literature…can hold up those things that mainstream society doesn’t believe: that Black people are there. One of my jobs is just holding that up to the light so that everyone can see that they’re there.”

Katherine Mooney Brooks on art, illness, and the failures of the body

That first morning, I remember
clinging to a table’s edge—
both legs jackhammering the white

linoleum floor tiles—praying for
my benzodiazepine to finally,
finally kick in.

If there is
a God, is there such a thing

as holy regret for what he’s made?

This is terror
and this must be how it happens—how need

alchemizes into belief.

1. A patch of nothing the size of a nickel above the nape, smooth moon, the beginning of myth, the spread of skin and each morning’s sheddings at the feet, each little swirl, a parable, unblessed.  2. Forced to lose the one crow-shined feature I’d been allowed, each week another round found, spots, pale and…

It takes a lifetime’s blindness to see one’s father.                                         —Cid Corman My father mumbled forth his violated commandments for half my life. I inscribed them on incense and holy water and when I drank them they tasted like cigarette ashes in a coca-cola can. There were no tablets save the pills he didn’t take.…