ISSUE: Fall 2005
after Goya
Heat-struck, bleached, a sucked pit
rolling in the mouth of his fever, he lies there,
ready for the leech,
anxious, brave, his soul stamping
in the bullring of his consciousness,
but fragile too, a blown-glass stomach,
the bones in his wrists like chalice
stems, the first leech soft upon his skin,
like a brush-tip,
like a tongue, the doctor probing,
trying to look inside,
as if he might drop his lantern
into the sinkhole of the lungs,
then scooping
his arms around him from behind,
so that Goya dreams
he’s a soldier
being dragged from the front,
the beautiful Spanish dust kicked up
into his eyes, the doctor urging him
to cough the bullets of infection
out, though when Goya feels the rim
of the water glass flush against his lips,
it’s as if the reared-back horses change
to marble in his gaze, rifles
losing their erections,
bullets leaving only clotheslines
in their paths, so that he’s hiding himself away again,
smuggled in the basket
of laundry his mother carries
through the yard, wobbling, trying not
to let her see, the wind
fluttering the shirttail of his hair,
his body
turned now to equal parts tenderness
and rage, the crossed swords
of his rib cage being raised
even as the doctor prepares
to dunk him in the washing tub again,
using his forearm like a blindfold
to protect the eyes, though,
all at once, Goya glimpses
his own face, a watery self-portrait
that wrinkles through his mind—
which is how I saw him that morning,
in the dialysis room, more than a dozen years ago,
strung between my draining tubes as the machine churned
the blood out of me,
his face wrinkled and pale,
flapping like the tail of a deer,
a streak of white that I followed
through the green forest light of a seizure.
