Song From the Deep Middle Brain
When everything around me tremors
why should I be still?
Emerging from my left
side came this palsy,
my arm transformed
into frangible branch of cold leaves
wavering, made slow, heavy
by invisible wind or ice.
I closed my eyes and it was still
there in morning’s bracelet
light that slid down my arm,
down to my fingers,
as though many synapses
spoke only gibberish to one another,
unaware they were no longer
transmitting but sinking fast as sound
slips from ocean shelf to slope,
to rise, then irretrievably from the plain.
My father’s hands shook, Anya said,
as she manipulated my body
through warm water.
She held me up and her fingers
caressed each vertebra,
and I bobbed as if atop a wave,
a pale, scarred fish.
When I was a little girl in Poland,
she began her story,
we had to cross a border
and there were men demanding our papers.
My father could not open them
because his hands shook,
and his papers fell like the pappus
of dandelions onto a frozen ground.
Why are you shaking they asked him,
searching his face
for lines that might transmogrify.
I am a child of war, he told them.
At this, they laughed and laughed,
but let us pass.
Why did they laugh, I asked.
Anya shrugged and said:
You see, many things can cause a tremor.
And I stretched under her
steady healing hands
as they coaxed my limbs
through a dark pain.
She knew of places in my heart
where I would eventually come to rest,
once I had learned
what children of war learn:
how the body submits
to absolution
so it might again
float.
