ally

I'm no good at images, only words, and yet for days after surgery, as anesthesia and countless   milligrams, milliliters, millions of drugs leave my system, I'm lousy with visions, each lousy with meaning. I lay in bed, unable to move, struggling to keep my eyes open; I know that if I close them,   I'll be lost, I'll be lost, I'll be mired in waking dreams, coherent visions with all the logic of that paler side of consciousness. Perhaps the veil here is still too thin and vague, the pool too clear, the monsters too scary   too lean, too mean, too hungry, or perhaps I was too close to death to come away totally unscathed, too close to completely survive.   It's as though, laying here,   stinking of hospital,   I'm seeing emotions play out,     Scene after scene, scene after scene,   anxiety shown in heaps of discarded entrails,   hope in the ceaseless ratcheting of gears,   determination in the marching of feet. If I were an artist, perhaps I could hope to touch these images, but as it is, every word falls short,   too vague, too inexact, too tight to hope to explain something so vast by the very act of attempting to reproduce; I can only hint from the margins. That poetry can accomplish what prose cannot in its economy of motion is attractive to me, here in recovery -   so tired, so tired, so tired - so maybe I can hope to express the dire import of these visions dancing behind closed lids, or at least remind myself on rereading. Even now, a week out, I'm starting to lose touch with the visions, I can almost touch them if I squint,   lie real still, don't move now, but even then, a shadow of the substance... I'm starting to consign to memory that which was probably memory to begin with.