Fall Down Easy
There is the happiness you have
and the happiness you deserve.
Jericho Brown
As a Human Being
Wide now and hidden by
a man's simple genetic bio
-logy
for chest and belly hair, the scar
they left you
with 16 years ago next month
is a brand scalpaled
by the hands of the doctor
whose ungloved fingers I couldn't stop
looking at: pristine
as you'd think them to be
and tips ballerina thin
confident through each jointed
pilon, digit and knuckle. I'd wanted
to distract myself from
the ticking numbers of infant
morbidity rates
and thought: look:
how confident wrist to tip
how it's simple as the lift
of the ballerina
we all pay good or bad money
to witness just the once if we're lucky
the entire weight of her whole
body on the tips of her
toes. I bet you know
it's called pointe
and I bet you know
it's pronounced pwaent
and I bet you know
there are records
minutes and minutes
long of endurance and duration.
I'll say it's like holding your breath
and I know you understand
that the deep drawing in
the settling the counting
how it all starts before the burning
starts and how there's almost as much
resistance to close your eyes
and puff out your cheeks
like something is living
inside there suffocating
but you'll never let on
until little pins of light
until the possibility of drowning
until the doctor resuscitates
let's die, revives, and reinstates
with the lift and then dip
of a little knife and later
ungloving sighs maybe
and lets the whole world fall
in easy the only proof then
of saving it an abdominal
scar not as broad then as my son's
smallest finger but now
wide as a grin as a medical
routine through hours of
scoping through the intimacy
of a bowel the discovery
behind the omental wall
of the smallest of deaths
coaxing the living to part
ways with to lift the little blackened
corpse from its soft ossuary and tuck it
in the gauze and lace it in
but only later after the ropes
of the colon are neatly coiled
again and set to working
set to doing what dirty work
they were shaped for earning
their keep now behind a man's
rub and grunt after good warm
soup and bread.
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