Читать книгу Book of Dog - Cleopatra Mathis - Страница 17

Labyrinthitis

1. When it began

First a fret in which everything changed.

By morning an underwater language

had overcome me.

When I tried to rise

my body said fall, and so I did.

My weighted hair, my head

turned me over. I could not hear him straight.

I was a doll with a mechanical box, the Mama

crying over and over, a dummy,

a dropped marionette.

Hold me, I said.

So sorry, he said.

2. Not making sense of it

If he was calling, I was too far under—

arm over arm

tangled in the heaving wave,

the body catching

the slap of stones,

swept through a passage.

The brain’s sea in a little box

washed in, a spinning top

come to a stop. Tilted.

•

He was walking some inert shore.

Always the lifeguard, he used to say,

eyes fixed on the water.

3. Nevertheless a common disorder

Some infection in the water, a nastiness

washing through. At first an incidental ache,

then recurring, inflaming

the air-filled cavity of the middle ear—

who knows how it starts,

how it finds the inner ear,

a spiraling labyrinth,

the fluid-filled temporal bone

where two organs live: the embedded

nerves for hearing, or mis-hearing,

and, in a semicircle of canals, the home

for balance. Never

one without the other.

Somewhere in there should have been a marriage.