Which is what I call chicken soup, because once I got
blood poisoning cooking up a pot—raw chicken,
nick from a knife, the next day a puffy thumb, then blue streaks
running up my arm like an evil river in my own veins,
fever, delirium—and I was reading Specimen Days at the time,
about Whitman's Civil War nursing and how robust
his health was before he got blood poisoning assisting
with an operation and how he never really recovered,
and when I'm telling my friend Bob this, he asks
if reading about Whitman's blood poisoning alerted me
to mine, and I said, “No, I think it caused it,” because reading
will do that to you if you don't watch out, like the time
I was reading The Idiot, and I saw that my boyfriend was playing me
like Gavril Ivolgin was playing the gorgeous messed-up
Nastasya Filippovna, who was playing him right back,
so maybe that's not a very good example. Let's try again—
my beloved Dorothea Brooke—when she married Mr. Causabon
and he turned out to be a horror show on ice skates,
I realized my next boyfriend was not the incarnation of Krishna
he claimed to be but was writing The Key to All Mythologies,
so which came first—the chicken or the lightning bolt to the third eye?
But back to the Civil War—what a mess, like any war
with young men being used as cannon fodder, and here we are
in the middle of three wars with another civil war
brewing between the coasts and heartland, and I remember
being stopped by a woman in Milan who said
how beautiful the city was before we bombed it to ashes,
and now we were bombing Iraq and Afghanistan. Her face
was trembling and I wished I'd had the Italian to say, Signora,
how beautiful we all were before the bombs fell on our frescoes,
on the young men who should have been holding their sweethearts
instead of maiming each other at Chickamauga
and Gettysburg, on every song that rises from our throats.