Code

SYNAPSE

There is this story I want to tell you

about the time a doctor left me

with a catheter halfway inserted

you know where while he spoke to his wife

in the hallway outside the door

and in that moment one had time

to regard the body and bless the human

capacity for distraction, to learn

how the flower of grace bears the thorn

of murderous, Viking-like

fury. Did he want the pie left over

from last night, she asked,

and I knew then they were speaking

in code, that lunch would not be

the sandwich she’d made for him

while he showered, but sex,

and in this I could almost excuse him

when he returned from

dawdling in the hallway

with this woman who draped herself in euphemism,

that she was pie, dessert,

delicacy, secret openly discussed,

that she was for him

offered for the hour,

and, see, even in that intimate, invasive pain,

I began to love her

face, that I could not see,

but I knew was lit with candid, conspiratorial ardor.

This is the story I want to tell you.

How we knew that light,

once, you and me,

and as I remember it

we’d find without fail

ourselves clumsy

in the darkness of one room or another,

in elevators, in auditoriums, on the road to St. Louis

as the earth fell flat

all the way to the liminal edge of the sky,

in the fragrant stacks

of some arcane corner

of the library,

wherever it was possible for our bodies to speak

one to the other

the narrative of the nerve.