Lael Ewy

Murmurs

CW: medical trauma

2-21-’21

You’ll come to love it, the harsh

antiseptic flavor that burns

your tongue and nose. For now

it thumps heat out of your heart—

that thump-swish-thump that

has brought you here, cheek-flushed

and cold-handed, lost

among the scrubbed tiles

and red bricks, the maze

of wings.

This place will lead you

to absurdity, a comfort

among the jangling nerves.

→After a while, when they stop

listening, you stop screaming.

(No one considered how

lone me thin me tiny

me—five—curved home

his breastbone, scarred

by the ripped sutures.

Even the blood went

unconsidered.)

At some point, you stop

wondering. You should never stop

wondering; you know this, yet

at this moment, the red brick becomes

just red brick; the castle behind

it disappears into ether. Counting

backwards from imagining

into the distance between you

on the operating table

and the you

who floats above.

Where will you be again

when the wonder stops?

You should wonder—

stops. With your whole world.

2-28-’21

Voice 1: the routine is safe.

Voice 2: this is not the routine.

Memory can come in

cycles or it can be

constant. Across Hillside,

Brown’s Grill: to celebrate

the city’s aviation heritage,

a carousel of aircraft

circles the hours. Their drone fills

the mind, but when, finally,

released onto the cold side-

walk you look up to see

them, they spin against

the sucking blue sky

in total silence. The red

scar in your chest glows

through the cotton

of your too thin shirt, your

too thin body. How did they

ever maneuver in there?

But then, even in ‘77

the open chest, stopping

the pediatric heart, the rending

of a valve, a suture or fifty,

even that,

had become routine.

Dissociation is the dream

drug abusers waste

a lifetime trying

to pursue.

Nothing beats trauma as a teacher:

the body flayed out, displayed

to the heavens. From then on

you’d hear the saying “by heavens”

through a new place, from just left

of all those watching; they are

with, you without. The circle’s not

eccentric to include you. Later,

looking at Albert Schweitzer’s

organ in a wood-paneled room,

you’d think of heaven this way:

something of cedar after all

these years, no longer sublimed

from alcohol or iodine.

3-7-’21

There is no church here, yet

exposed before god at both

places, your heart-

beats then, and then, and—

then again. The seat,

they say, of the soul, if

we can be said to have one, being

the heart. Now, for a time, un-

seated, allowed to wander

the surgery suite, to linger

over the heart-lung machine, to

listen to the breathing tube,

to be—

as The Bard wondered.

Returned, you would

wander the dirt roads

and wonder why

worship seldom reached

your heart revived.

In the universe of memory

there are no revolutions;

memory, the experts say,

is a created thing: we all

are the mad gods of memory.

How will we know the now

from then? PICU is still

PICU. Then, they let the tech

do the talking: the line

beeps out life, beat by

beat by

(Worship, let’s call it,

is the mover moving

through. For those

of us who’ve been

there and back,

there is little left but

hollow masks,

declarations. The magic

gone, we wait

for music.)

Now, they let the tech

do the thinking. Then,

the pale green was enough:

the green of scrubs, the green

of skin starved of the young,

shallow suck of oxygen, ever

green. Never

before or after,

when the bellows breathes

for you, the soft clunk

of the heart-lung, it’s you-

and-not-you; a dependency

leads to a yearning

for the organic. Ever

after, a new opening

for the scent of fresh soil,

well turned.

Triggers:

needles,

syringes,

isopropyl alcohol,

small pads applying

sanitation for injection;

the Darth Vader breath

of supplemental oxygen,

certain shades of green. Balls

that rise to measure

aspiration, the sickly

scent of overcooked beans. Cold tile,

bare walls, cotton swabs, beds with metal

rails. Stethoscopes, the gel and suction

cups of EKGs: lub-dub, swish; lub-dub,

swish.

3-21-’21

There is no shame in looking things up—

1977, cardiopulmonary stenosis, Brown’s Grill—what did it matter: red bricks, tile floors, the planned intervention of stainless steel, so sleek, so modern, so easy to clean. But what, you wondered, even then, are they needing to clean off? It was blood, I knew then, and its inadequacies. We believe funny things about blood: that it’s relational, or that it circulates, along with serum and red and white cells, some soul-force. We think blood projects rage or lust, surfaces to reveal our true minds, our selves, our natures. The universe of metaphor is expansive. And if reduced to flow, to oxygenation, the washing away of toxins, the mess it makes in a clean space, it, and we, are less. Let us be less, for a moment, mere meat, the flesh made flesh. Rather than lowering our angst, so circumscribed, it rises: to be meat is to meet fear, the possibilities of reduction, dismemberment, the cut. It electrifies the blood, the nerves, raising you on your foot-balls, as you cling to the fiction of yourself.

4-4-’21

The blood is toxic.

Medication is toxic.

Toxicity equates with survival—of

bodily insult, selective dismemberment,

the pain of healing. Being there

is tantamount to death: breast-bones

sawed through, ribs splayed open,

skin flayed for the sake of access.

“Khoury did good work,” years

later a sonographer declared.

“If it wasn’t on your chart, I

wouldn’t even know.” Indeed,

I admitted, but you should have

been there, smelled the sweat

of work the body does to heal

from healing, the distance from defect

to perfect through the hard hell

of the heart. The machines that keep

you alive when the heart is de-

commissioned hiss assuredly: “To do

this, I must breathe through you.”

The truth is, I remember everything.

The truth of memory is that truth

is constructed. I take

from recent memory what has not changed:

brown (note, not red) brick, white and green tile, compound

that which I imprint upon: the acrid

smell of Bactine, the green beans, the sputum

of drowning lungs. Trauma

is not forgetting: Trauma is

memory refined.

Trauma is memory refined

for purposes of survival,

the rival consequents of then

and now. Some live only then;

we call them mad, drop thick

lithium on the razors their minds

have whet. Some use now to keep

then safely at bay. They tap

and shake and bop and drink;

they take the past into abeyance—

until the body washes the toxins out,

and then returns again

(as always is

again).

And how do we feel it—

in our bones? Time

collapses, is

telegraphed: black

cherry Jell-O

sickens as it quivers,

color of dark muscle,

the form shifting,

contracting, from

jaunty wiggle to

shivering threat—

this distended,

random, spoon-cleft

mass upon my plate,

may ailing heart.

5-16-’21

When was the last time

you experienced something

as yourself, inside your self,

being with the pain with-

in you, radiating out

from the bones within

your chest your new-

scarred heart alaugh

madly beneath its

arched cage, the scars

that bore you into

adulthood, that draw

you even now into

the wild sphere of the scared

child, the inner scar

allowing blood to pass,

the outer scar the letter

of your ever-healing hurt?

6-4-’21

Khoury did good work, but

the scar isn’t straight. You’d

think the little j-turn it takes

toward the throat a flourish, art

of the bodymind variety, instead

of just the way the scalpel slips.

They assured you that, in time,

it will just become another part

of you, that you’ll stop thinking

of it. It did—become a part,

that is, but you’ll ever stop

thinking of it: choose your partners

wisely, they with their own scars; hurt

likes hurt, forgives it. In the dark,

the imperfect know, hurt’s traces

radiate a warmth that holds you.

6-13-’21 (coda)

Do we ever tire

of the fetish of

our own suffering?

Evenly stated: “I

was . . .” subject/to, or

“I am . . .” diagnosed/

are as medals

wrought in the melee

of claiming said I.