Turning Point

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Sample Poems by Arlene Swift Jones



Red Cabbage


I cut the red cabbage.
The sharp blade unfolds
layer after layer

pushed together, fold
after rolling fold of white,
purple-coated leaves.

They bleed on my fingers
or do my fingers bleed
dark bluish blood

upon the cabbage?
The slicer whines
against my hand.

Layers open: thickening
and thinning, branching out
from the tough, inedible,
white cone heart.



 De Humani Corporis Fabrica,The Fifth Book: Female Generative Organs Andreas Vesalius, 1543


I was not nobly born, and I was held in disrepute
because Brother Giovanni, of the order of St. Anthony,
called Il Santo in Padua, was my lover.
I carried his child in my womb.
Oh, why had he taken Orders?

My parents and my lover came to my grave
with flowers and a crucifix to find my body gone.
Outraged at such defilement, such blasphemy,
they took my case to city magistrates.
But they could not find my corpse: Vesalius
and his students skinned and dismembered me,
so no one could know whose body it had been.

I was stolen from the tomb
by Andreas Vesalius, body snatcher and anatomist.
Never was I so beheld while I lived,
with such nervous, rapt attention.
No one, not even Giovanni, had seen my body naked.
How they carved it. They took out my heart,
my organs, my little child, they drew pictures
as though they were Giotto, or Cimabue.
I heard them laugh, I heard them wonder
if they’d find the devil when they touched
what would have been a child of sin.
But they touched him, cut him out.
 
Oh, St. Anthony, make my body whole,
put it back into my grave, my little nest
of eggs, the swimming sperm like kisses
to my dark mouth.



Rheumatoid Arthritis

    for Drs. CLC, CSR at The Hospital for Special Surgery, NYC

Parts of my hands, my left
knee, are dust. They were
incinerated in the hospital
dump. Ashes already.

We work together, decide
which bones have expired
their use, talk about them
like old friends now dis-

tanced by their going off.
Now the shoulders’ turn: their
sockets once gleaming remark-
ably like giant pearls

in their oyster cases,
the bluebone now bruising
as beachstones with the sea
gone, leeched away. Its

synovial sheath corroded, it
scrapes the pearl metamorphosed
into sponge gone fossil-rigid.
We talk about them as though

 they are a raspberry garden
brambled by overgrowth, by
canes which must be thinned
to save the strength of berries,

to fatten the purpling mass,
sweeten juices; as though they
are bittersweet gone beyond
into a neighbor’s orchard,

climbing trees, choking apples.
It is better to lose parts
bit by bit than have the earth
greet you whole, and suddenly.


 

The Operation

They brought Betadine in a paper cup:
disinfecting, the stain
yellowed my skin. They punctured
my bluest vein: ungracious, bare,
the IV waited to do its job.
Through halls of perfidious tumors
waiting patiently to be excised
they wheeled me to doors
which said No entry
beyond this point! Shivering
in stained skin, under a worn gown’s
faded geometric flowers
I entered a dazzling arena;
I was lifted to its chilled stage.

Eyes peered from green gauze helmets,
muffled voices drummed my ears
with words that weren’t for me:
all the mysteries of my body
yielded up to them:
my only part was presence.

I awake into a room
abandoned by language, empty
of cool hands to say It’s over.
No curtain calls for me
nor in the crowded space
is there a place for flowers.

 In this room the bell I ring
is never answered.
            



Intensive Care


Only white coats enter this landscape
wearing masks for faces, faces without words
for us: this is a wordless place. Pain

tells us we are alive: we cherish it.
Under the drownings of needles, the suck-
ing tubes, our green hearts

jump on the TV screen—thrillers
that occupy our minds. Familiar eyes
peer at us, expecting to see a map

of a new country on the outline
of a sheet, intrigued to know John’s heart
was held by human hands.

The colostomy under the bedsheets
makes faces turn away, knowing
that hands unsnaked the knotted mass

of innards whose story the tube
from my nose tells, as it carries
the curdled waste of food

caught undigested. Henry’s multi-
plying cells are unstopped,
careening drunkenly into the intricate

 passages of his interiors… Faces cannot
 greet us, faces which saw last weeks’
flower petals fall as soundlessly

as thoughts outside this room.
We see the clouds fall, we see
the architecture of our careful dreams.

We see things you haven’t seen.