Operative Coda, begun
“like bright light through the bare tree.”—Louise Glück
the wind takes its voice from the shape of his spindly body in the rain
syllables themself gulping at air
his body wrapped in vowels the shape of stride, bones buckling like pop being opened
the carbonation of questions and dispensing of pills and procedures
what was it that we once dared to take off?
your name lost in echo, the patient’s thoughts a cypher of syntax and grammatical freefall
the body’s sound splintered, the stuck-to softening spoken in a forlorn discourse
the corridor voices and the mob’s unmaking, an index in faded mint scrubs and pale blue
and you
the dandruff stains and blood bugs on the gown in the aftermath, a 16 yr old regurgitating yellow bile in the adjacent bed
his mother whispering hope as he slept through the tube removal, was it that you dared
to shape with scalpel and saw and opiate, the gulls on the horizon stretched into consonants, the bottles stuck in the sand
your hair a choir as fear crescendos up from the surf of Lintou, Qixingtan and Cijin Island
were these the waves from a morphine dream or twilight’s memory in the afternoon
merbromin sunset, mercury poison alchemized into the skin’s melody and medicine
death drops like a nightdress falling from thin wrists, the silver engineering of you
all he has survived, the recumbent and molecular, questions to become and to go missing past the soap and dressing, the Mercurochrome and the re-oxygenated lungs, the hood-winked thoughts, metal cardiac valve rusty in the rain, a mistrust in the brain, a steak just a breath past blue or the wind, in the hallways an alphabet of wobbly-wheel steps up the stairs, an accordion of this and that, antisepsis, antidotes, accumulated aches along the repetitive hallways, the flirting past the counter of the nurse’s station once you dropped down, agape, all along the watchtower, airborne toxic events mouthed in rhyme, the returning to life, the leap over the breach?
the bright light in sky, the spell of winter breaking from a 9th floor observation deck decked with wheelchairs and whelps and what might might have gone wrong and the cars waying underneath and nothing sharp and angled but luminous sound and in a well-swept corner you hobble, unsuture your gown and untie yourself and begin to cry, just a post-op and the light, what had closed up with tool and dye comes undone and he weeps, unrollable now, tears and counting and he is there and no one else and he licks up the pain in his chest and no one else and now the scars a birthmark and now the fear and no one else and now the sadness and no one else and the loss and no one else and the loss crying alone alone alone has he forgotten to forget the tapestry, alone.
the bright light through the bare body, his heart a kite
in the light the tears go, the body goes, the visitors go and he is there hungering, his mouth mimicking words a white jar an opiate on a thin steel neck poled above him, a lamp-lit light dragging behind 9 stories up and he is all hunger for red sugar and the streets of Taipei, all hunger for the sea and her fingers in the sand and for his skin to be salt wet and the sun and his chest scarless but that is now gone, when?
death drops like light along University, was it you
who nursed him back to life when he was opened, when a staff of young faces and masked smiles pried the chest and bone cage open with stainless steel and carefully planned abandon, the heart raked open and turned inside out with well-educated and long scrubbed hands, indifferent banter and the pristine jokes in the operating theater turning him mechanical, device and alchemy, catheter, guide wire, stent, atherectomy device, vascular closure, optical coherence tomography, scalpel, heart-lung bypass machine, saw, polypropylene sutures, plates and screws to hold the breastbone and ribs in place to later heal, vicryl and monocryl sutures and not a god damn word about red sugar or tropical light or the touch of his rhymes against her skin at night, not once, not ever until sleep deep and black and dreamless begins the mechanics of re-birth but the pain must be endured.
the line that encircles his shadow and holds his memory in place, the line that brings the palimpsest logic, he an absence, life now death’s exoskeleton and meaning, the waiting you had waited for a lifetime, a life-line to bring you back, was it the morphine or the sea that swept away swept away the unbuilding and the cleave, the phosphorous at night, the rust in the shell run and winged and spent, a life rivering seaward until the heart collapsed and collapsed and collapsed.
you awoke beside the shore unwavering in the wind, remained through all the cutting and carving, the bleeding and swallowing, the hobbling and equipmenting, the ventricular assist device that drew more than all the prayers, the mechanical miracles and language long in its leaps of faith and after it all, afterall he awoke again and walked again and scribbled again and held you next to him again and became alive, and aware again as death dropped but they survived still and still still bare and light and two nations and the surf
with the Golden bridge towing the distance, your body a bowl of shellshock and thyme
submerged language salvaged of ghosts gut, brine and star
a basket rimmed with red sugar, hope mined from the Pacific sand and continental weather
undeniably corporal, they wore midnight’s coat and together became the restless sea.
for: Wan-lin who returned me to life
