Ostrakon
A potsherd (or occasionally: a piece of limestone) used in the ancient world as a
writing surface
I.
To deflect the day, I found the Coptic plank
with ink inscriptions fading downward,
wood painted, then paled, wood warped by water,
wood with its careful accession number
strummed in red across frets of grain,
so we can’t forget the museum that boasts
a Theban passage too far from its home.
Part-distracted, I phrased the question:
When did the writer wake up?—crudely—
I’d meant to ask when you were born.
I don’t know you from Adam, as they say.
Was barely awake myself.
II.
I tend not to know how to say when it hurts. Firstly,
I don’t know what it is. I wait for the call
and no doctor rings. Wait, then, some more.
And, too, how to phrase? It hurts, too hazy,
also presumes you know about it already.
Is the pain here, as if sensed in mammal
form behind my back by a rolling prickle
at my nape? Has it just arrived
on the last horse to make this little prairie?
Do I have it? Do I own it? Is it mine
to keep? Can I point to my gut
and have you understand a sense
famously incommunicable, minimized,
distended, comparable only to one’s own experience
and as such usually kept under the tongue whole
like a talus bone? I talk around it. This way
I don’t lose it. I taste its chalk chafing off
each time I move my jaw.
III.
I realize the connections so far are oblique.
I admit I’m often afraid to uncover
an affinity so palpable to me: If no one else sees,
what then? Such doubt tends to gray out
even my own idea. But I’ll venture.
The ruining flank of Coptic wood puts me
in mind of what I can’t say: too complex,
or too basic: too human, either way.
I don’t know why it reminds me of the pain.
Of another ostrakon broken from a gray and orange pot,
the papyrologist writes, “The content
of the letter remains unclear, as often
with private letters, even when
they are complete.” (This one was not.)
Later, she reports that “the repetition is awkward.”
Therefore I write to you, the person copied
more than once. Possibly about a chicken farm.
The 27th day of some month. Greetings. Farewell.
IV.
“Pain is always new to the sufferer, but loses
its originality for those around him,” wrote Daudet.
“Everyone will get used to it except me,” and so
I often detain the dry flake of information
that might pile up with today’s weather,
the shush of thin bends of grass that asks
idle thoughts of when it last rained
or when one last washed the sheets, and the record
on a used envelope of which groceries,
toward which meals, you brought home last week.
V.
I don’t know you. I hardly know anyone.
One of the great curiosities: not exactly
that I know anyone, but that I do know you,
then don’t, know and don’t, know you in spindles
from your handwriting’s facture. I, more bluntly,
imagine you know me. Therefore I write to you,
the ostrakon says of a business matter.
Therefore I write to you, so that you know.
*
My Doctor Shows Me Images of Endometriosis
I guess I’d been avoiding them in research: the spread
of black dots over pink tissue shining
in heavy laparoscopic light. Utter, impatient light.
She says it looks like pepper. And I think
quickly of necrosis—oh god it shouldn’t be
so dark—before my own comparisons: caviar
for the color and anomaly (not rare, actually;
they just so seldom treat), galaxies clinking
like sacks of crystal with the weight,
grains of sand in the bedsheets or pebbles
in shoes. My childhood’s television static, the static
of a limb cut off from blood. The black
dulls and grows like dial tone. The metaphors don’t come
to me for comfort (in any case I don’t feel easier);
they come in the depth of my incomprehension—
is my life so opaque I need those tethers? Through them
I try to honor the aggregate. My horror, my pain,
my daily drag, my range shrinking with my motion,
my wonder, and my waiting cluster
like the disease itself. Impressions gather to
the seams of organs and make trouble—stick
me together, pull me apart—and it’s all I can do
in daily conversation not to rattle all that off.
*
Scrap Essay on Self-Pity
There are times it spills over, though I work to avoid them. For example, at the end of a yoga class with a friend, the teacher spoke while we lay in savasana. It’s the hardest pose, he said, because it requires stillness; in that space, self-compassion might seep in. Rain, the first in weeks, fell on the lap pool outside, which overflowed continually on the concrete. I took up the risk of stillness and, unthinkingly, easily, before I knew what I’d done, cast self-compassion itself as a risk—and it is, somehow: the minute I choose it I feel my usefulness, my wretched productivity, leak away. I was crying, and trying to keep it secret: no stuffed nose or gasps, just the symmetrical sliding of one stream into each ear, quiet as the water down the plate-glass windows.
I often consider the difference between pity and compassion. If compassion can be seen as simple witness (as they ask of the mind in meditation), pity implies a welling of judgment. Toward myself, I can’t say it’s common to feel the mercy of compassion without an edge of shame.
My friend told me she’d dedicated our yoga practice to her pain—she thought I’d like that—and I actually had, too; in that hour our pains stretched and cursed beside each other, lapping at our bodies, which tried gamely to keep them in.
