I dreamed that alive and levitating
I lay upon a bed, no, a table,
(later, I’d learn I was anesthetized, hallucinating).
Everything glowed gold as the heart of a saint,
and then another needle pierced my vein, and I rose,
myself, from the cold slab on which I lay,
as clouds of gnats do (lyrical, nearly invisible),
to the gloved and concentrating crowd
waiting to slide the silver hand between my legs.
Surrounded though I was, I was alone,
and in that aloneness I shattered
like a glass thrown down a dry well, reverberating
into something higher than the body knows.
Time (that immaterial glacier which calves
against our will) spoke: “What’s past, is now—is this.
What can undo what it does or redo what it undoes?”
Then a mask came down upon my face. A throne
rose too high for me to see. The seraphim
had no wings, no faces, no feet—they couldn’t fly.
Doorposts did move, voices did cry unto another,
but nothing was holy. The earth was empty,
lightning moved upward from the ground and the coal
nudged from the alter fell burning for years only to go out
the instant it touched my mouth. The lightning
wouldn’t ignite it, nothing would bring it back,
so I wrote with it—until I woke, alone
as I ever was, and bleeding.
Two-thirds of medical students in Oklahoma reported being asked to perform pelvic exams on patients who hadn’t consented. Ninety percent of medical students surveyed in Philadelphia performed this same exam on anesthetized patients, not knowing how many had actually consented.