MRI
At rest, the machine makes a softer sound,
almost pleasant, something
like a lone cricket, perfected in its measure.
But the technician is too
bright, illuminant as the room—talking
with someone in the glassed
control booth about Dixie Donuts—and so
overweight I cannot
imagine she could fit herself into the tube
where she will send me
in minutes. It is Friday, late afternoon;
there can't be many of us
left to see. She feeds me into the mouth
of the thing, telling me
to follow the breathing directions as best I can,
and I do, for the next
three quarters of an hour, breathe in and out
and pray, curse, clench my teeth,
sorry as I have ever been for myself
and suddenly sorrier
to realize that I am the last of the many
this day; someone else's
face was just this close to the low ceiling,
someone else's worry
saw this flat whiteness. In my hand I hold
the small, bulbous call
button everyone must hold, with the same
nervous lightness, I can
imagine holding a moth—so as not to kill it
and not to let it go.
The metaphor for it metastasizes, too:
I am in the belly
of the beast, the belly of a whale, in some sterile
wilderness, desert
island, sand-blind; I am a thread in the deep
eye of a needle; in some
percussive otherworld that rises up
every time I exhale
and hold still my empty lungs. And then I come to
and settle on a tunnel,
a real one, the one they call the Paw Paw
for the nearby trees,
and a day in early June three years ago,
and I can stay in there
long enough to survive it again—artifact
of a place, a quarter mile
through a mountain in western Maryland.
You are never out
of sight of the end of it, and still you find
you do need that borrowed
flashlight you thought you could do without, its battery
feeble, jittery beam.
Mules and men died in here, hauling out
the stone to make this
passage, narrow towpath alongside a stream
of water you can hear
but cannot see. The way out is searing
and round, a worthless sun
that lights nothing but itself, and still you choose it,
the entrance behind you
just as fixed but changed, somehow, another
state, no, another country,
farther away, now, you are sure, than this.
- Claudia Emerson (from One Magazine)
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