Arrows // Tony Hoagland

[iatrogenicmyth.livejournal.com]

When a beautiful woman wakes up,

she checks to see if her beauty is still there.

When a sick person wakes up,

he checks to see if he continues to be sick.

He takes the first pills in a thirty-pill day,

looks out the window at a sky

where a time-release sun is crawling

through the milky X ray of a cloud.

   * * * * *

I sing the body like a burnt-out fuse box,

the wires crossed, the panel lit

by red malfunction lights, the pistons firing

out of sequence,

the warning sirens blatting in the empty halls,

and the hero is trapped in a traffic jam,

the message doesn’t reach its destination,

the angel falls down into the body of a dog

and is speechless,

tearing at itself with fast white teeth;

and the consciousness twists evasively,

like a sheet of paper,

       traveled by blue tongues of flame.

   * * * * *

In the famous painting, the saint

looks steadfastly heavenward,

             away from the physical indignity below,

the fascinating spectacle

    of his own body

                     bristling with arrows;

he looks up

as if he were already adamantly elsewhere,

    exerting that power of denial

         the soul is famous for,

that ability to say, “None of this is real:

Nothing that happened here on earth

and who I thought I was,

and nothing that I did or that was done to me,

was ever real.”