on this occasion

Kimberly Campanello

Metaphors about illness, when you are ill for life, like the poet K, are sharp as a knife. They bring illness, its trajectory, and significance to the forefront of the mind. Lodging them in that space right there, where other things get done and felt, sometimes. Or where nothing at all happens, which is perfectly nice.

The poet K is sick to death of metaphors used to describe illness. They cut through every encounter, no matter how banal. As if through butter. Melting in the mouth. Melting the brain.

A conversation at the shop, a night out, a work meeting, a class. A metaphor tossed K’s way. A baseball floating toward the open mitt. K hears it part the air before the drop, and she catches it, or it catches her. In a trap.

What seems to be mutual exchange is an invitation-only event. Bait. After which. Switch. What metaphor could she throw back. Back broken. Straw. A last.

The poet K hopes to use metaphors to fortify the sick, to sensitise the well, to dam the stream of disconcerting verbiage, and break the irreconcilable chain of figuration. To know what she feels. To speak.

A roiling wave on the great lake back home. Its water sometimes, somehow, freezes clear. Ice. The cocktail bar in the capital down south with its vintage liquor has its special ice, unadulterated, incomparable. Pure, or purified. It barely melts so not to dilute the precious elixir from that year when the city was furiously bombed and a particular bottle survived, unshattered and undrunk.

K is the character seeking the cup of life. She finds it humble. Others expected gold. The sort of finery trotted out for the honeymoon package deal. Package deal. Fine print. No refunds. No recourse if rerouted or if the route was ragged or rigged from the start.

Others counter: It’s all in how you look at things. Rose-tinted.

Much of the time, K can’t see what she wants to see, even if she tries. K spills the cup on herself before she can notice the height of its meniscus. The grass. Its colour. Not over that fence.

Inaccessible as such. The road less taken, well. It’s taken by the well. Wishing.

Others wish well.

Or they say, nearly every day, they have witnessed this sort of unravelling. They know what it’s like. They say this in response to the simplest statements K might make.

Statements like it’s good for me to stretch out on this green sofa, so if you don’t mind, I will take this seat.

And the response from the guest sweeps away the ground beneath K’s feet. There was no warning.

Geysers seem timed but aren’t. Pressure builds. They shoot skyward like clockwork, but not. In K’s living room, no audience is gathered. No park ranger explains.

The guest says she witnessed her mother go through the same thing as K is going through now, or was it something like it. Does it matter. How much. K just wants a glass of wine on her Friday night.

Going through.

The guest speaks of her mother’s going through, how the pain was always there, a hum, but sometimes there would be a sharp and sudden screech. The guest tells K that at one point her mother realised something about the sudden pain in her limbs in relation to her brain.

It was cables unlinking. The elevator car suspended in its shaft. Lines cut. Snapped. Gravity intervening.

Again and again until.

K had wanted, needed, the better seat on the green couch, which she would have liked to offer her guest. That was it. Instead, she finds herself in a lift, plummeting. The guest across from her testifying her witnessing. The wine beside both of them undrunk.

When rejections come, for her writing or other projects, the poet K isn’t floored or deflated. Or buoyed up. Some things feel less urgent, can be backburnered, for now.

Quite simply, K is beginning to forget what it was like to not be able. To, for example, sit comfortably, regulate her body temperature, move her mouth in time with her thoughts and keep top and bottom teeth from clicking against each other when saying something, complex, or not.

On this occasion. Anyway.

K is in what used to and is still sometimes called the honeymoon period. Many have amply critiqued this phrase.

Despite the high divorce rate, a honeymoon invokes something different from the brief periodic bursts of quasi normality some experience when initiating the gold standard meds K recently began.

So with these meds, on this gold standard honeymoon package deal with its chalice filled with rare historical liquor chilled with pure ice, K can walk somewhat, somewhere, for the first time in a year.

She can cover a short distance, until her ankles turn in and other symptoms raise their heads and street corners, city walls, park benches, speak. They say please lean, please stretch against me, please sit. K can gather herself now, to sow, to share. Be herself. Original. Unique. Never change. Please. The K in the high school yearbook so described, just like everyone else.

She can write by imagining, like writers say they do. She doesn’t feel the pain now, as such, but to keep the meds calibrated, to record their effects, she has to think it. She must describe pain’s absence to make sure nothing else has cropped up. Typical. Daily. Experience.

K no longer feels shooting. Splitting. Throbbing. Pulsing. She doesn’t feel gnawing coming from a jaw and teeth closing on her leg, or tiny mouths eating their way out of her limbs from inside.

Anymore. Or rarely.

She must measure time carefully between pills and plan the just before and after, where she is, what she’s eaten, as though it is a prayer.

No legs in cement. Or it’s only just poured. Rarely tipping back with each step as if the earth was forcing her to behold the sky, yanking a string from the back of her head down to the ground, her body a wetted branch stretched into a bow. For what.

Shoot.

The famous archer in the sacred text a guest poet had used in the workshop at the university where K did an advanced degree. They read various translations, from different cultural contexts and eras, all much later, much further away from the sites of those scenes.

All the characters are gods, are metaphors for god, split and aching for its selves, but in a necessary way. This point about pain, separation, longing, action, statis, destruction and generation is made again and again in this and other texts, which was why the poet started the class with that piece, if what K recalls is correct.

A reason. Tender. Squeezing.

K doesn’t remember the pain from before and so she can pretend. Perform something, anything, beyond the mere gathering of herself into a heavy bag carried over the shoulder or on the head. If she feels tender, it is toward herself, the one in the past whose suffering she can hardly conjure. So she resorts to this.

K remembers the night she cooked many courses of food for the guest poet and the other students in the class. They came to K’s tiny house with its sagging porch under the live oak tree with its hanging moss. A series of words that figures a whole region. The live oak asserts its status as a living thing by never fully dropping its leaves in any season, which means it is always dropping leaves, always part dead.

A trail left on the floor of the house K just bought in the mountain village in the land of her ancestors. The trail is dust. Wood. Not sawn. Gnawed. By tiny mouths eating their way out of the limbs of chairs.

Boring. Pulsing.

The larvae long gone. Now beetles, they took flight. It takes years to come to this. The sites say you can never really know if you have them after those holes appear. You must wait years for signs of life. You must paint the exits closed.

The forecast for K and those like her is a spectrum of dark and light. Partly sunny or partly cloudy, neither state resembles that special ice.

The violent movements wrought by the gold standard or the brain itself depleting. Or both. No one knows. Eventual to some extent for most.

People from K’s community appear on TV. Racked on a non-existent machine. Never still. Wracked like a ship wrapping itself around unseen rocks in the depths of the sea. It’s hard to believe, but they forget this unrelenting feeling after their skulls are opened and wires are placed. Until, of course, the waves return, crashing against them, the shore.

This seems like a comparison, but is not.

They see themselves on the news and on fundraising videos and they can’t call it up. They can only imagine the feeling. It must have been like.

Sometimes because of these wires in their head, they can’t speak.

Still, for now, they raise their beer in its bottle or their elixir in its chalice. They toast progress. They laugh because progress is their group’s specific trap. The catch.

Leaves always falling. Holes painted over. New ones appear.

K receives letters of rejection at turning points, one of many on the way.

On this occasion. The volume. Not in a position.

Or some things are taken. Placed between covers.

Where is K going. Gold standard still holding. Treatment ongoing.

Daily, under covers, K logs into the systems. Submissions. Medications, appointments. Enter. Your unique.

A new development. She must prove she is human. Set down a green dot at the end of the car’s path. This requires imagination, knowledge of dimensions, belief in the unseen, turns in a schema. You know where it’s going. The vehicle. Facing its direction. The pitch. Success.

Is it enough to get by.