the body of pain - websin her twin bed, hearing the wind whoosh, the rain slap and beat

The Body of PainPoems by Judith Skillman

© 2007, Judith SkillmanAll rights reserved.

Photo by Sunny Williams, Used with Permission.

Readers are granted the right to make copies of this collection of poems or any one poem under the following circumstances:

1. If you are creating a single physical copy for yourself.2. If the copies are used for an educational workshop or school.

Copying this collection or any part of this collection in circumstances other than the two listed above requires the written consent of Judith Skillman.

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Lily PressLily: A Monthly Online Literary Review

http://lilylitreview.com

for Janée J. Baugher

“What shall we answer when we come to be examined by pain? Without God we are no longer persons. We lose our manhood and our dignity. We become dumb animals under pain…”

- Thomas Merton, No Man is An Island

Table of Contents

Tinnitus .......................................................................................................................................... 6Body of Pain ................................................................................................................................... 7Case History ................................................................................................................................... 8Spasmodic Torticollis .................................................................................................................. 10Bubba ............................................................................................................................................ 11Plunder ......................................................................................................................................... 13Vis-à-Vis Flaubert ........................................................................................................................ 14The Body Especial ........................................................................................................................ 15Head Injury .................................................................................................................................. 17Casualty ........................................................................................................................................ 18Dengue ......................................................................................................................................... 19The Snags ..................................................................................................................................... 20Root-Sick ...................................................................................................................................... 21To One Who Is Intimate With Illness ......................................................................................... 22Montezuma’s Revenge ................................................................................................................. 23Parkinson’s .................................................................................................................................. 24Echocardiogram .......................................................................................................................... 25The Bleph ..................................................................................................................................... 26Crow ............................................................................................................................................. 27Breath Hunger ............................................................................................................................. 28

About the Author ......................................................................................................................... 29

Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... 30

The Body of Pain • Judith Skillman

Tinnitus

All night the woman floatsin her twin bed, hearing the windwhoosh, the rain slap and beatagainst shutters. She has giveneverything to find this white river,where she can stand and see the glaciermove its snout along a ridge, nosingthe ground as it uproots treesand sends rocks to their death.

But rocks can’t die, she thinks,as wind and rain pour ceaselesslythrough her. She supposes the past, like matter,can be neither created nor destroyed. And as she sleeps she rummagesthrough shells on a beach, touching feathersthat murmur like birds, lookingfor her lost ring. In her dream she hearsthe common crow chase a red-tailed hawkinto a corner of the sky.

Beside her bed the ocean roarsits single name, coursingfrom the sound conditioner. A light rain thrums. Wind chorusesits white noise, wakeningvibrations deep within in her cochleae.She hears her mother’s fine chinashiver from a shelf and break.

6- The Body of Pain • Judith Skillman

The Body of Pain • Judith Skillman - 7

Body of Pain

If it were a handbagit would have a kiss lock.If a wild boar, tusks dirtiedby years of foragingfor roots buried beneath plantain.

If it were a unicornit could be seen in the carpet gardens,where I lie on my backtrying to make out other facesin wood, fire, and fabric. With steam the kettle screamseach winter, louder. If pain were a moan,it would steal through vents in a housefrom room to room like a roach.

Thin claws, indelible scratching, codesas conditional as love.Ultimatums.Heredity wired with genes.If the body was Gulliver’s

it could not belong to the Lilliputians,and vice versa, though how to tellwhich is more—the large denialor the small tying up in bundlesof monstrous endings.

Case History

A toppled tree.I can see where waterloosened its rootsuntil they gave way.

This tree reminds me of a strong womanwho does for others.Even now she lieslike a patient full of trustin a green hospital.

Snow melts,trickles down foothills.One by one the white doctorscome to the foot of her bed,tired from the effortit takes not to care.They thumb pagesand whisper to each other.

I imagine they are sewing her up,stitching her midriffback together with beaks and feathers.That they have conferredand discovered contagion,or worse.

It’s so quiet I can hearmy thoughts falling around me.The hush of a library,or that place in a storywhere something wants to happen.

Skunk grass, poison weed, and nettles conspire.Yellow fungus bloomson a log, and I rememberfour hollow tubes carrying wastefrom its endless site.

8 - The Body of Pain • Judith Skillman


I think the patientwants to diebut doesn’t know how.So she lies there,

dirt forming a black skirtaround her legs.

Spasmodic Torticollis

It soundedlike an Italian dish,something with artichokes,fresh bell peppers,curvy pasta and asparagus,not a malady. The doctor said,It happened while you sleptface down on one sidefor too long…I felt like a horsein blinders—unable to turntoward the painof an excruciatingstreet scene.When I tried to glanceover my shoulderat the younger selfwho watchedme from shadow,I held the rigid postureof a schoolmarmwho would not listento a tattletale, no matterwhat the story.It was as if a stiff,uncompromising widowhad replaced me.Where was the hapless,disorderly sleepof that younger womanwho had, with her easy mannersand the breath of her sexiness,for too many yearseluded me.


Bubba

In recollectionshe’s grown bulky, I suppose.That’s why she won’t go upstairsto the second-story roomfull of mothballs and red beads,the outgrown dresses whisperingon long racks.

Sometimes I hear baby woodpeckers squawk from trees.I think they were abandonedin conifers,born and then forgotten,but it’s possible even these unfortunatesare protectedbecause of her, kept from the evil eyethanks to a bit of sputumfrozen to a leaf.

Her grave’s more shallowthan it was years ago.Her corpse is a nurse logwith squatter’s rights,lying on its sidein the great woods.

If I walk on solid mudpast her headstuck in the groundlike a winter cabbage,who will stop me?

Her right to sit up latereading the endless Agatha Christiestranslated into Polish,laughing out loud,strategizingand talking to herself.

I suppose she’s busy bargaining with God,entertaining him


with fancy causes and effects.I can still hear her arguments ebb and flowin sickness, see her orange blood, arterial, in the soft woodof fallen cedars.

I know blood is blackwhen it comes from the stomach,and bright red when it stemsfrom lower down. I’ve learnedthat there are as many germsin the body as there are citizensof the earth.

Having heard enough already,she brings the cataractsof her cloudy eyesclose to my face.


Plunder

The summer the birds tookfrom us, lootedour tree, we watchedas dark pits fell to cement,and stains spattered the glass table. We knew there would never beenough booty for jays and starlingswho ravaged the cherryto find what was not quiteripe or ruined. In their harvest we tasted deprivation.We watched war news.The birds sang.Their songs spoiled in the heat.Gossip-rent: the world, the yard.

Messengers sent to disrupt our sleep.At 4 a.m. we dreamt we’d sleptand then they woke us up again.Bloodied pits they cleansedin the clay bowl where they bathed.

I remember tousled feathersand arched wings.The splash too shallowto echo against the laurel hedge,its tightly woven leaves.


Vis-à-Vis Flaubert

In Salammbo’s Carthage,a sky-veil hid Mathos.He used it to escape the throng.It pulled him like a wingover the drawbridge.

Here the crowd appears to have left the city,its plane trees and angles,the wasted, whisper-thin bark.

The sky veil imposesa certain solitude on us all. It hides each from the otherin equal measure—the ungainly from the vain,the sick from the well.

Those who have money to burn,and those who must burntheir money to feel a little warmth.


The Body Especial

I said I had almost forgotten about the sick.Their glazed eyes, their little fevers are spawningthe same conclusions. We go in, and the dayyawns open, white pieces of sky pinned back.

A room. It always begins in a spacewith a narrow table. Here are the eminentdetails – the useless magazines,acres of acoustic ceiling, and squaresof gauze that wait for tongs and silence.

But it wasn’t there, exactly. Althoughit began there, and took on the slight heartbeatof arrhythmia, due, we speculated,to a gratuitous electric shock.I remember leaping backwards.Epiphany took me by the shoulders,no less.

I say it began there. And changed, overnightto black pockets of fluid, caught up, dire,needy – those places in the second bodyI carried.

*

El Niño comes again with its red spot, a bruise,a septicemia clinging to the coast,bringing this rabid girl with it. Her hairis tangled, so I lean in close, thinkingI’ll study the overlapping strands, and finallydecipher the rats’ nests.

The child throws pills at me and wanders offinto a dream. A version of herself,ripe with cysts and strong urine. Samples leak from odd containers

until she spawns a sister



who grows an anomaly when her ovarieskick in – size of a mandarin orange,we were lucky: these wordsspoken underwater, by a surgeonin green.

Head Injury

Now, as then, the cripplesrise in the forest, where birds by the hundredsbathe and the sun pours in by accident.Not to know how or whymemory occurs, or what was pre-figured:the not-to-know grows dailyin the forest, where moss sinks its teeth inand the selvages become lined, avenuesof leaves. So much gorgeous redgoes on showing itselfa by-product, place-holder, ruffleof the diligent shadow that keepsthese things under wraps. Even for cripplesthere is a listing, a sadness, and dreamsof danger, being pursued by the others.Of the events themselves, say onlythat we were present. We saw or felt or heardthe yes in tiny letters and numbersetched in bark and knot holes,and no, we said, and again no.


Casualty

When the footbridge was crushed,the scent of sawdust rosefrom a gashwhere men made their clean cutwith chainsaws.

I remember your father’s thumb,tip gone, nerve dead at the first joint,an accident of teethwhen he went to helpa neighbor clear a fallen tree.

A tree is a body.Your father was a soldier.He didn’t care about his thumbany more than his death,drowning in his bed, the fluid filling his lungs.

Any tree is a body, a story writtenby the years, circles nestingother circles, the way memory closes into eclipse certain moments.I touch the open wound

of the tree. How sticky it is.Impressions of beeswax, sand, and honey.For centuries it stood, old growth,one of the last survivors. Owls cameand made their home in its branches.


Dengue

Thailand, 2004

With proboscis, compound eyes and net wings,a hundred whirring machinescircled and landed on our skin.Two young women in a two-man tent,we zipped the screen, closedcloth windows with metal snaps.

We shut the canvas door, pulledsleeping bags up to our mouthsin ninety-degree heat. The oceancrocheted saltwater,foamed and frothed,turned creatures into cretins.

How many hermit crabsdied that night?We heard the sound of our own handsswatting the tent wall,accompanied by cussingand hissing.

With every swat, each bad word,the shock of bloodreddened dank walls.At dawn we found swollen weltson arms and necks,beneath our thick, humid hair.

Breasts and thighs weren’t spared.On my ankle a red bruisebecame a hellish itch.We drove back to the bungalowin a silence inclined toward insanity—its fevers and hallucinations.


The Snags

The ground pauses under their limbsas they peruse its crushed cans, bits of paper,and Styrofoam.

I can see their earthen beds, the dirt pillowsand hollows for knees and hipswhere, legs elevated, they sleepthey sleep the short, uneasy sleepof the dead, and waketo strident crows, close in,brushing soot off their faces.

They have assembled here,my three dead uncles, garish in suede hatsand bleeding madras, gawky under the weightof small rodents and birds who have madetheir homes by complicated departuresand returns.

One of them with Parkinson’s,one with melanoma, and one whose heartthickened, vessels stifledby a stream of words.Childhood’s fast, red car

stops outside a hospital in Ottawa,and my uncle the doctor gets out,leaving us alonewhile he goes in to birth a baby.We play out an hourapart from time, too happyfor what happens.

When I return my gazethe snags have changed places,pacing up and downsmooth passageways of forest carpetlike expectant fathers, husksleaning toward anticipation.


Root-Sick

I carry a cold sap in my veinsthat will take the poplar downand split a house in two.

I carry memories of my childrenwhen they were young,learning to walk and falling down.

The big leaf maple growsinto the ground, until a second treeflowers in soil, mirror image

the wind can’t touch.I carry luggage fastened with metal casingand memories of Belgium.

Once upon a time I say, but nothing comes of it—I’m stuck to the futureas well as the past.

Always a chateau—the directressaccuses me of throwingtea against her papered walls.

The present’s nothing morethan a branch of deadwoodthe south wind scours.

Its tigress mouth busy with house cleaninguntil the earth can breathe again,shrug off scars that bind perennials to their beds.


To One Who Is Intimate With Illness

Its secret paths and weather,phlegms and fevers.

Its bowls and straws,white sheets and nightmares.

Its cold baths and glaring bulbs,little words that mean nothing.

To the nurse of dead childrenhuddled with sore throats

returned from their deliriumcenturies later by penicillin.

Give me a single reason why the sickshould be trusted on their cots in the dark.

A pillow is a ration of breadbelonging to a special friend,

a pillow is a wooden chesthoarding its hunk of bread.


Montezuma’s Revenge

What, after all, can be saidabout the indelicate? That it’s a nasty business.Mahi mahi under a palapa,rice soaked in vanilla –the rope bridge we crossedto get from resort to culturegave no sign of sickness.

What, after all, can be saidabout revenge? That it is infectious.I remember a sea the color of turquoise,heavy birds with black feathers.The waiter said,We’re out of chicken, I bring you pelican.A slice of lime posed like a smileon the lip of the largest glass I’d ever seen.

Bloated with pleasure, we walked the beach,fended off vendors who only wantedto feed their children.Come here, spend your money,one said to me. Quartz charms,turquoise and silver, silver and malachite,silver and onyx. Across the street,scowling women hung their worn towels

like flags. The church, the Tequila Factory,the darkness inside each shopconveyed scents of musk,wrinkled oranges, speckled bananas, cheap lipstick.Was it the leg of a chickenforgotten for hours at room temperatureor the nameless green pepperthat made our eyes tear, our throats beg

in another languagefor the most essential element,here where Montezuma still owns the water.


Parkinson’s

A slowing in the nerves.Spurred by the bony moonand one star, an eternal nunwhose face she remembers,she stares up at a planetcovered in mist.

The dogwood’s grown so tallshe can no longer touch the flowersthat float there. At the crownof the magnolia a few blossomsremind her of objectsthe crows could pick up and carryif they weren’t sleeping in ink.

She knows how want peels back.Under want is numbness,and beneath that the pitythat traps her with its color,bright and artificial.

Huge petals float below the ceilingof sky, its rim of cities.Along her spine a trunkof wood lies superimposed,thickening with the years.

A little less dopamine left nowto cushion the urge for sex or sleep.She wants to believe in the clear borderthat might still existbetween moon and bone,planet and star, star and flower.


Echocardiogram

My heart is a herd of horsesstreaming toward the finish line,hooves smacking against the track.

My heart is ill, swollen in its chamberswhere once the virus came and made me believein Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.

Scaffolding on the cot where I listento the dark blood that will not clot runningsmoothly through aorta and artery. My pulse

runs amok. One hundred beatsper minute the shy technician says as he replacesthat part of the bed that let my left breast drop,

apologizes for what he will do next—locate my heart between slots of rib.Smooth as jelly the minutes pass. I listen to these horses

grown more fantastic with each jolt of the whipfrom the small jockey who has lost so much weightonly denial will keep her here.


The Bleph

I’m in the theater of the operating room—wide awake despite ten milligramsof Valium. The surgeonseems genial, genteel even,given the oversized hospital gownand anxious, naked,middle-aged woman beneath.

This is an elective procedure.I could no more pretend to be a victim,walking into the hospital,waiting my turn to be admitted,than a child.

The surgeon tells meto imagine I’m at a spa,with benign music,masked, turbaned nurses,and a bright lightlike the sun above my face.

He injects the local.A slight poke, he says,but it is more than that.A bee hovers, stings,injects its venom. Liquid snakes across my eyelid.

I wonder whether Evewasn’t curious but vainto take the apple and bite down,its sweet flesh so much like hers. How young the young becomeas we age.

The surgeon measures in centimeters,talks to me, draws on my lids.I stay as still as if this were the dayon which I learned to own the bodythat no more belongs to methan anyone else.


Crow

The crow on a branchblown clean of leaves won’t migrate. Instead it asks,Have you heard the death cartrolling in the street?Have you heard the vulture’sglossy cries?

Crow-black, winter-black.Come winter.Come raven, rook, & jackdaw.Crow, crow in the grip of holy days,light a cinderwhere a pane of glass cut the fingerand bloodied the hand.

What can you makeof phlegm that sticksin your throat? To eat crow,to crow with success.Crow on a branch—soot-dark, wood-rot, leaf-mulch.Roll call of raven, rook, jackdaw.

All those who saw the evil eyesewn to Grandmother’s apron.How she tried to waltz.How she smiled toothlesslyafter her bad breast was taken offby the surgeon.


Breath Hunger

As if she were at altitude,the air thin and cold.A dilution, a lack.The same kind of dreadas a death rattle. Mornings, when she ran uphill,the trees were swollenwith oxygen. Branches reachedtoward her, tentacleslike the octopus. She was afraid of bright orange,of what waited on the culvertalong the spitin the drowning place.There, below the water line,etched on steel,was the tell—tidal highs and lowsdriven by the full moon.She picked tiny crabslike berries from metal.Held them at arm’s lengthand watched their legs beat,miniature pincersnipping at nothing. Thought she would liketo hold the octopusin her mind like a question.There was nothingbut the bloatingof all that was not hers.She envied thosewho could breathe freely,laugh, yawn, call the earth home.Even the chelahad its grasp,the claw its largesse.


About the Author


Judith Skillman is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Eric Mathieu King Fund Award from the Academy of American Poets for her book Storm (Blue Begonia Press, 1998.) She has received grants from the Centrum Foundation, the King County Arts Commission, and the Washington State Arts Com-mission. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has an M.A. from the University of Mary-land in English Literature. Skillman’s poems and translations have appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, FIELD, Northwest Re-view, The Midwest Quarterly, Literary Imagination, Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Seneca Review, and many other journals. She has published ten vol-umes of poems, including Worship of the Visible Spectrum, Breitenbush Books, 1988, which won the King County Publication Prize, and Red Town, Silverfish Review Press, 2001, which won a Bumber-shoot Award and was a finalist in the Washington Center for the Book Award. Heat Lightning: New and Selected Poems 1986 – 2006 was published by Silverfish Review Press in 2006. She is a faculty member of University of Phoenix, Washington Cam-pus; and the Richard Hugo House, Seattle, Washing-ton.

Please see www.judithskillman.com for more infor-mation.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), where these poems first appeared. My gratitude to Charlene Breedlove, Editor, Poetry & Medicine, for her expert edit-ing of certain of these: “Tinnitus,” “Case History,” ”Spasmodic Torticollis,” “Bubba,” “The Body Especial,” “Dengue,” “The Snags,” “Echocardiogram,” “Montezuma’s Revenge,” ”Parkin-son’s,” & “Breath Hunger.”

“Casualty,” Words and Pictures Magazine“Crow,” River Oak Review

Several of these were printed in the following:

“Echocardiogram” and “Montezuma’s Revenge,” Heat Lightning by Judith Skillman © 2006 Silverfish Review Press, Eugene, Oregon

“Breath Hunger,” Coppelia, Certain Digressions by Judith Skillman © 2006 David Robert Books, Cincinnati, Ohio.

“Head Injury,” “To One Who is Intimate with Sickness,” and “Parkinson’s,” Red Town by Ju-dith Skillman © 2001 Silverfish Review Press, Eugene, Oregon.

“Tinnitus,” “Case History,” and “Bubba,” Beethoven and the Birds by Judith Skillman © 1996 Blue Begonia Press, Yakima, Washington

“Tinnitus” also appeared in the anthology Uncharted Lines, JAMA, edited by Charlene Breedlove.

Thanks to my family, Tom, Drew, & Jocelyn Skillman, Lisa & Josh Tuininga, and Bernice Bloom Kastner, for their ongoing support of my writing.


the body of pain - websin her twin bed, hearing the wind whoosh, the rain slap and beat

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