TRIPTYCH
1.
When I woke up one morning with half my face still sleeping, I knew it was my due. I looked in the mirror and was not afraid, exactly, but amused. Half my face slumped like a hunchback. Half my face was a Cubist painting. It would be like this for many months. At the hospital they told me about the viruses that might have stunned the nerve that then suspended my face in place. But in my mind I kept returning to the poem I had been repeatedly reading in the weeks before, as though it were both an omen and a prayer. Dilapidation is organized, the poem said, ruin is formal. Dust, rust—every crash began as a slow, consecutive failing. My broken face was the crash.
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2.
Now I am like the picture book for small children where the world has somehow been cut in half. Half chair, half hat, half table. Half my face smiles while the other half keeps to itself, immovable and gray. Half door, half flower, half woman. One of my eyes sees, the other is in constant tears because it cannot close, an irritated little storm over the eye’s globe. Half lamp, half cat, half shoe. Half rug, half book, half of a half moon. The half of my face that doesn’t work seems to have doubled in weight, sagging like a sack. In the book, there is a half knock on the half door and the woman’s other half appears, leaping towards its other in reunion. I walk to my own front door and one eye looks through the peephole at nothing. The other eye waters.
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3.
I have become the lightning field. She has placed the needles across my body, the way the artist placed the tall glittering rods across the desert. Blue needles on my hands, yellow ones on my shins and feet, red ones on my undone face. The room is as dim as dusk. She has burned some sandalwood that makes the room smell like the desert after a rain. If there is a new electricity that is supposed to be coursing through my body, it is silent. The needles are as light as touch. I am on the border of sleep. I will be well and I will never be well: this is what everyone must think, lying in this room, their bodies open to a rending and curing sky.