Having more MRIs this afternoon with 3 different views. Putting a feeding tube in for nutrition today. Dr. Burke in and said ct scan of head drastically changed from recent one in Marquette.
There were some other details in the text with some very scary medical terms (vasculitis, acute demyelination encephalopathy, and emboli). It sounds like my sister is not really improving down at the University of Michigan. I don't think the doctors have settled on any course of treatment because they don't really know what's wrong yet. The MRI was postponed until tomorrow for some reason, so I'm not quite sure what "drastically changed" means.
It's been quite a long Monday. My work day stretched on and on, like some kind of weird science fiction wormhole. If I didn't know any better, I would have sworn that I was reliving the same moments over and over. Of course, I am not living in a Dr. Who episode, and my day eventually ended.
Tonight, I will be working on a new poem. Actually, it's the second part of a poem I started several weeks ago. I was asked to write it for the sesquicentennial celebration of my wife's church. It's quite an honor. It's also quite daunting. I can't imagine how poets like Maya Angelou and Elizabeth Alexander and Richard Blanco dealt with the pressure of writing poems for presidential inaugurations.
My Ives Dip question for this evening revolves around the future:
Will the future hold happiness, for my sister, my family, myself?
And the crystal ball of Mr. Ives' Christmas says:
...Ives would put some Perry Como or Bing Crosby on the big RCA console with the twenty-one-inch black-and-white TV, radio, and phonograph that his boss had given him as an extra special bonus one year, and the tree-decorating party would begin, the adults chatting on the couch, eating, everyone smoking cigarettes and watching the kids at work.
Well, that's a passage that has one leg in the past (Bing Crosby and Perry Como) and one leg in the future (kids at work). But it's a happy passage, full of hope. I will take that. It reminds me of the Christmases when I was a kid, with all my siblings listening to records on my mother's record player, the tree sparkling in the corner.
Matthea Harvey is the Poet of the Week. Her collection, If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?. combines all kinds of things I love--fairy tales, Elvis, aliens, and Shakespearean possession, to name a few. The poems are sometimes irreverent, sometimes funny. Always profound.
Saint Marty's life feels like a tabloid headline right now.
Using a Hula Hoop Can Get You
Abducted by Aliens
by: Matthea Harvey
We've never taken anyone
buttoned up and trotting from point A
to point B--subway to office, office to
lunch, fretting over the credit crunch.
Not the ones carefully maneuvering their
watchamacallits alongside broken white lines,
not the Leash holders who take their Furries
to the park three point five times per day.
If you're an integer in that kind of
equation, you belong with your Far-bits
on the ground. We're seven Star-years
past calculus, so it's the dreamy ones
who want to go somewhere they don't know
how to get to that interest us, the ones
who will stare all day at a blank piece of paper
or square of canvas, then peer searchingly into
their herbal tea. It's true that hula hoops
resemble the rings around Firsthome, and that
when you spin, we chime softly, remembering
Oursummer, Ourspring, and our twelve Otherseasons.
But that's not the only reason. (Do we like rhyme?
Yes, we do. Also your snow, your moss, your tofu--
our sticky hands make it hard for us to put
things down.) Don't fret, dreamy spinning ones
with water falling from your faces.
It's us you're waiting for and we're coming.
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| Beam me up! I'm ready for a different life. |
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