Little Pharma Encounters the Spine

Power travels down and out,

feeling travels back. Not coal

so much as dam, not sex

so much as combing his hair

by fingers, not the Charlottesville

Exxon pumping the night into

the night so much as the black

boughs of soda dispenser

in the station’s strange, eggy

inner room and the cups all

frothback response when

the fountain’s plastic levers cast,

or the public tennis court

uphill from the Exxon shirring

wattage on the players’ lines,

how it will scare up a game simply

because light’s coming down.

Here not immanence but vector,

a cord you could hear

beneath hearing, easy as crossing

your eyes. Now cross. Come in.

This rope in bone broth,

tender as a leg by Watteau,

who can carry one behind

the heart and not feel she must

have plundered all this

hid museum under skin?

Lucky then to be bred

collective in ignorance of breaking,

enspecied blithe. Mercy blanked

as protein whites the fish’s dimming

market-eye. Do not tell us

we live fragile. The word eats

sinkhole into bone. Mr. K,

middle-many years of age, forbade

me speak it—when the tumor

wedged alongside cord and spine

it wandered neck to floor,

unmooring dermatomes.

At first he lost

the governance of  breakfast.

Then, world’s slowest snowfall,

sensation to the back.

The morning he was called

to surgery found him at the bathroom

sink, attempting dance, clutching

the faucet’s chrome swan neck

in sacrifice. And not to fall.

When, pre-electric, we gave birds

to gods, we must have known

a snapped neck broke a downward

power, emptied space for other

currents in descent. We also

by this gesture cut off

feeling seeping center-up.

Perhaps explaining why we never

sensed an answer. Summer nights,

faint hawking of tennis balls

across and replied, sweet contagion

colloquy, who believes we will

not have perception as a fleshly

proper right?