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Neurosurgery Sonata
I've imagined it many times and still, it jars
like a fist to the jaw. There will be music
despite everything, you quoted, and yes, my pulse
quickens at Zoe Keating's electric
cello even now, enough to need tissues.
I imagine it so often, it's as if I saw
the surgeon, swathed like a priest, drive the saw
into your skull. Like popping the seal of a mason jar,
he unhinges blood and bone, exposes the gray tissue
of his trade. The nurse presses play on your music
as instructed (cue the cello); nerves bathe in electric
oceans of anesthesia; the pulse
of cello strings drop like plumb lines through the pulsing
Z of the heart monitor. I believe you hear it. But that saw
haunts me -- some real Frankenstein shit. Where's the electric
bolt of lightning? you'd joke, but I can't laugh. The jarring
raze of its serrated music
cleaves my tissue-thin
bravery. Time, I have learned, is a flexible tissue
and the muscled pulse
of your neurons strums its own shining music:
our first kiss on a darkened street; the see-sawing
oars of kayaks on the bay; whiskey sipped from jam jars
on the Fourth of July; fireworks glowing electric
as you rise between thighs, electrified --
years of time folded tightly in a cortex maze of tissue
where somewhere, my body wanders through synapses that jar
and flicker like Vegas highways, pulsations
of neon in contiguous, cursive constellations. Tell me sawing
stars from the sky is impossible, that music
can't be severed from melody, the cellist from the musical
oscillations of her instrument, the wild electron
from the nucleus it loves. Say there is not a saw
for every bond. Say that our minds are not lanterns of tissue
paper, easily torn. Your pulse
holds you together a while -- a fragile jar
of stars humming their music in the dark tissue
of space, an electric dance of neurons. Like hope, they pulse.
O trade me a saw for a spoon, that I may scrape the sides of that jar.
