New Poem - Snafu -- for DVerse Poetics

To participate in the wonderful DVerse Poetry memes, follow the link.  

For me the impasto technique in painting is similar to what I would consider a "pastiche" method in writing a poem-- particularly one with a narrative arc.  The layering of detail--figurative language-- like building up layers of paint, is precisely what imparts depth.  I've sat on this poem for quite some time having a long and hot debate with myself.  As Virginia Woolf wrote, "I have (hopefully)  unburdened myself of my meaning."  xj

Snafu

Jet said the family was angry—angry that Henrietta’s cells were

being sold for twenty-five dollars a vial, and angry that articles had

been published about the cells without their knowledge. It said,

“Pounding in the back of their heads was a gnawing feeling

that science and the press had taken advantage of them.” 

From The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot.

I once imagined I had saved a few of your brain cells.

For many years I was afraid to have them unlocked. 

How much of your coding is mine. 

How much of you am I—

I would have shaken off this heavy

coat of self-doubt but long after you died

I scared myself mad and thought the stars

flashed on the ceiling of my brain;

I lay beneath a table in an abandoned house, weeping.

Someone shouted at me “You are not your mother”

but it was too late; I had taken you in,

cannibalized you, dissected

What I did not consume. Finally I put on my white coat

and took the vial from the refrigerator.  I spread you on the slide

and scrutinized you like a miner looking

for a vein of silver. 

Your cells blinked at me like eyes, accusatory: 

You grave robber.  I am in the service of science

I told you.  Open your eyes.

ii

I hid from your madness in my room.  I was ashamed

and I broke a pencil writing you a letter you never saw.  

Milton’s God made man from Himself. Not from dust,  

earth, but from God’s own celestial rib.  God wrought code

And built the cell’s housing by starlight.  The scripts

are infinite—this one for a jellyfish, that one for an adder.  

And this one for a mentally ill mother. 

This hieroglyphic, this gone mad dysplastic helix, mutations

Like warped dimes glittering on a glass slide.  A sideshow

for research;  they put you in mice and the mice

hallucinated: they caught glimpses of themselves

In a mirror and consumed each other. We devoured

Each other in this manner.  I ate your DNA and you ate mine. 

I had the blood of the water moccasin and you

the chronic fever of a poet.  I tried to hand back to you

the inherited darkness. The scripted faithlessness. 

iii

If we had indeed harvested a slice of your brain we would perhaps

know of a He-An cell as we know of He-la and Henrietta Lack. 

Yours I believe, would have lived in a vial back in the depths

of a lab in unwilling oblivion, until someone thought to examine

Your brand of madness under a microscope. In that interlude

you would have seen to it that someone heard your mourning,

your cursing at ghosts.  This is what your brain thought

it should do: sing out against inner perpetrators.

What became of the code when electrons were fired into it?

Those shock treatments.  Did it fragment or implode like

an over-turned scrabble board.  O my mother.  My one they

stretched out into a coma and violated with suppositions.

iv

God is, you would mouth, on your knees.  But not-God ruled

our years:  you taunted angels at full voice, at 3 a.m.

My own genetic sheet music, dark with rebellion, shared with Lucifer,

Returned fire, enveloped you like a hawk’s wings.

We sat at a small table, looking at each other.  I could not believe

I was pulled from you wet and writhing, that I began within you.

You wanted a girly girl, an angel, but everything is foreordained

in the cell--  except that in the blink of an eye the code

Misses a step: then cells grow wildly where they should not. 

Wanton malaise comes over the body; Huns in the kidneys, Cossacks

in the liver, infinitesimal materiel multiplying like junkyard dogs

in my cerebellum and yours.  

v

I made something like a mistake. Ill, I put myself in a nursing home

where you had been, where I saw you alive last. A woman

on the other side of the wall babbled to herself the night long

No one came to her and I could not, so great was the reminding.

I often see you sitting there in a metal chair dressed for church 
waiting for me. I would revive you in some other way, for answers.   
But this is impossible. I write in the wind doing the next thing 
and then the next-- the soul’s stained laundry. A casserole of blackbirds 
calling to the hands, your faux religious fervor au gratin--

I did not mean to refer to you as a pair of eyes.  When I last saw you 
they were mercifully closed, tears at the corners.  Forgiveness 
is slow to leach into my heart from wherever it comes.  

cc


copyright Jenne' R. Andrews   jenneandrews2010@gmail.com