Edgar Degas, After The Bath, Woman Drying Her Back, 1896
Gelatin Silver Print, 16.5 x 12 cm
Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program
the body is always at day zero which I’d forgotten
as I waited for my mother to re-emerge from heart
catheterization I sat in a fabric chair in J 2-3
on the mezzanine level caretakers could see the sick
world below though none see us
when she appeared fabric over the hole
in my mother’s jugular would’ve been white
but a shock of the darkest
iodine seeped down her neck like blood
in the procedure I heard the audience of doctors worked on one
side of a white table where they fiddled with their joysticks
but they set their screens on the far side
a woman was buried in the breach a weightless feeling
is anyone suspended on a table beneath lights
where the uncanny valley is your revulsion
at what you think is not quite human
my mother also looked at the screen
while the wire sheath went like the coldest water
down the heart trap I held my breath
I heard in that room doctors declared
what would happen next to the body
you knew then the patient entered this instruction
like a horn of light under the weave of a paper sheet
as if the body was a metaphor for the problems of the body
what we thought we felt what we felt we saw
as the curved arm moved across the torso
like the longest orbit of celestial light
we don't always go from wellness to wellness sometimes
you slip back into critical condition through that little door
under sedation my mother could feel everything
that was not pain while doctors took at least five bites
in biopsy to discover what the muscle was doing cancer
for its part deploys conscripting cells at the outer edge
of a mass and is not without cunning
in the lobby I watched cancer perform
its work in real-time on video
as cells stretched out their lassos in discrete segments
then pulled like a mechanical mistake
in a lo-fi videogame there is a green-gold tinge
where photo-emulsive shadows grow in such low light
for a long time ignorance saved my nerves
I cultivated my shock at the heart
in its bowl but my mother keeps
walking into a room where she knows she will be cut open