I stood there perfectly still, just as I had sat for countless medical photographs: full face, turn to the left, the right, now a three-quarter shot to the left. I took a certain pride in knowing the routine so well. I’ve even seen some of these medical photographs in publications. Curiously, those sterile, bright photos are easy for me to look at. For one thing, I know that only doctors look at them, and perhaps I’m even slightly proud that I’m such an interesting case, worthy of documentation. Or maybe I do not really think it is me sitting there, Case 3, figure 6-A.

I rooted around in the cabinets and came up with a hand mirror and, with a bit of angling, looked for the first time at my right profile. I knew to expect a scar, but how had my face sunk in like that? I didn’t understand. Was it possible I’d looked this way for a while and was only just noticing it, or was this change very recent? More than the ugliness I felt, I was suddenly appalled at the notion that I’d been walking around unaware of something that was apparent to everyone else. A profound sense of shame consumed me.

Because I was never going to have love (this realization, too painful to linger over, I embraced swiftly and finally), I cast myself in the role of Hero of Love. Instead of proving my worth on the chemotherapy table, I would become a hero through my understanding of the real beauty that existed in the world. I decided that it was my very ugliness that allowed me access to this other beauty. My face may have closed the door on love and beauty in their fleeting states, but didn’t my face also open me up to perceptions I might otherwise be blind to?

And so with the last of my birthday cash

I ordered the Abracadabra Kit.

The ad promised rivals would flee me in terror

and pictured grownups swooning (eyes X’s)

as a boy in tails drove swords through his sister.

I checked the mailbox every day and dreamed

the damage I’d do the Knights, the magic words

I’d speak to blanket them with zits, shrivel

their cocks, cripple their families and pets.

The kit came and of course was crap.

It can’t make much difference

to the murdered’s house

that this tenant left to the sound of sirens

instead of farewells and nostalgic songs,

that there was no room for books

or chairs in his moving van.

It can’t make much difference either

that he left before his lease was up.

Straight out of Grapes of Wrath, wrought from God

knows how many dead Fords, the chicken truck

sputters in the slow lane toward Chicago,

its teetering stacks of wire crates packed

with proto-cutlets, Kentucky-Fried-to-be.
Clouds of down and dander billow behind

like a slumber party gone haywire.

As I pass doing eighty it’s impossible

to discern birds: the swaying wall of white

is continuous as milk, unbroken

by any singular wing or beak. The hungry city

sharpens its long, unanimous knife.

A prairie gust shoves the chicken truck

smack into my lane. I veer, re-veer,

and my own sullen cargo opens its black eyes

like two empty cupboards, then closes them again.

WOMAN 2: The first time I saw the devil was in the desert thirty-five kilometers north of Shaarm, a multi-national army base. The devil first appeared to me in the form of a huge scorpion but it took on many forms during our brief encounter, some of them insect, some of them human, and once as a desert turkey, which I came to prefer. The roof of meaning, at any rate, was gone.

Delight was dressed as usual as a hypodermic. Her long legs in red stockings. In the aquarium in front of the glass she watched the Beluga whales. Next to her stood a man shorter than she with a red silk scarf around his neck. He swayed back and forth on his heels. The white whales turned sweetly and endlessly from back to stomach, interested only in up and down.

ANGEL/STEWARDNESS: Ladies and gentlemen, we are air-borne. I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome you once again to flight 003 to New York, and to remind you that the pilot has not as yet extinguished the seat belt or no-smoking signs. We would request that you refrain from smoking and moving about the aircraft until such time that the captain extinguishes the signs. I must request that all Muslims, genuflecting to the East on small rugs and all Jews swaying in front of any emergency exits, please try and act more like the Christians on board whom you will notice are sitting in their seats and quietly crossing themselves.

The last visitor left.

You closed the door and smiled at me.

I watched you cross Room 515 through

the flowers in vases, and your face

looked just like your face, smiling

down at me in my stupid green issue gown.

I felt myself want you

through the plastic tubes, 

the vines around, across and above me.

I felt myself want you

exclusively. Even pain faded

into the scenery as you leaned in

to kiss me. And I met your kiss

with my lips and we were both

folded into it,

into that clean clean folding,

that soft longed-for kiss

across the side rails. That particular kiss

in its delicious oblivion hoisted us

above the suffering body.

We felt that long transfer of soft

for softness, that kiss lifting us

above the basement drawers

where we would finally face up.

The seven astronomers lay on their backs,

upside-down skydivers.

The universe, said Galileo,

is made of interlocking shapes

written in a language of mathematics.

But how did it begin?  someone asked.

Your father's erection greeted your mother

through the window

of his underpants.

And then what happened?

A release of hormones; secretion

from neurons in the brain:

"I love you."

"I think I love you."

In the stirring of the wind, the glittering green

my story began. I’ve been laurel,

olive, fig and fir; I return again to play the role

of hospitable tree. I’m twenty years elderly,

yes, geriatric for a Pumpwood, a Cecropia –

these names they call me, they who listen

who know such bedecked and decorated

choirs in the cathedral of one rainforest tree.

I’ve fallen in finales. It’s a specialty,

but I fear the final scene: wind not a murmur but a crack.