Imagine

Imagine all the bluster gone:
the bruise-colored pools under her eyes
sublimated, effaced. Imagine a night's rest.

Sublimation: when something evaporates
without ever melting. I can't go forward
and I can't go back. But just below freezing,
if the vapor pressure is high enough
a solid can vanish into the air. Dry ice does it.
We're not without hope.

Hands that won't grip, that won't hold a water glass.
Eyes that won't focus, a wandering tongue
that won't settle to a single language.
I mutter imprecations in Russian and Malay.
Which day, which year is this? I go
to date a check and think,
it can't be 1978. It's January. It must be 1979.

She winces when I take the upper traps
gently between my fingers. A little roll of muscle
slender as a tinker toy, but it carries
all the misery of the world. Once again at the hoku,
where the thumb joins the hand, and
at the wrist extensors way up by the elbows.

I multiply by six billion, maybe seven,
to arrive at the human grief throbbing
through the body of the world,
meridians of pain, traceries of fear.

I carefully tie a medicine pouch
full of pollen, fill a syringe with the cowpox,
sing a quavery song in a forgotten tongue,
draw a battered staghorn beetle
from the sweating girl's side, to show her
that the evil has come out. Or I tell her
How I get purchase on the demon,
seize him by the trigger points,
and cast him from her body. All the same.

But imagine all the bluster gone
the bruise-colored pools under her eyes
sublimated, effaced. Imagine a night's rest.