Cardiac, Fourth Floor

The monitor kept better time than I did.
Its green tooth bit the dark at intervals,
and I—unbodied, or too much in body—
counted nothing. There was nothing to count.

They say a life unspools. Mine did not.
No corridor, no relatives arranged
in welcome at the threshold. Only this:
a widening. As when a door you thought

opened onto the hallway opens instead
onto the field behind the house you left
at nine years old, the grass gone silver,
your mother calling someone else's name.

I was not frightened. That's the part
I can't make sound true when I say it.
Fear requires a future to be spent,
and I had none. I had a great sufficiency.

Then the returning—which is the cruelty.
Not the leaving. The being called back
through the small aperture, folded,
crammed into the wet machinery again,

each nerve relighting like a street
at dusk, one lamp and then another,
and the pain arriving last, punctual,
a landlord with the rent already late.

They asked me: do you remember anything?
I said no. I said it was like sleeping.
I have been saying it for eleven years.
The field is still there. The grass, still silver.

Some evenings I stand at the kitchen sink
and the water runs and I am not
entirely certain which side I came back on,
or whether the door has ever fully shut.