40 Days and 40 Nights

Opening a vein he called my radial,

the phlebotomist introduced himself as Angel.

Since the counseling it had been ten days

of deep inversion—self-recrimination weighed

against regret, those useless emotions.

Now there would be thirty more enduring the notion

of some self-made doom foretold in the palm.

Waiting for blood work with aristocratic calm,

big expectant mothers from Spanish Harlem

appeared cut out, as if Matisse had conceived them.

Their bright smocks ruffling like plumage before the fan,

they might themselves have been angels come by land.

Consent and disclosure signed away, liquid gold

of urine glimmering in a plastic cup, threshold

of last doubt crossed, the red fluid was drawn

in a steady hematic ooze from my arm.

“Now, darling, the body doesn’t lie,” Angel said.

DNA and enzymes and antigens in his head

true as lines in the face in the mirror

on his desk.

                      I smiled, pretending to be cheered.

In the way that some become aware of God

when they cease becoming overawed

with themselves, no less than the artist concealed

behind the surface of whatever object or felt

words he builds, so I in my first week

of waiting let the self be displaced by each

day’s simplest events, letting them speak

with emblematic voices that might teach me.

They did … until I happened on the card

from the clinic, black framed as a graveyard.

Could the code 12 22 90 have represented

some near time, December 22, 1990, for repentance?

The second week I believed it. The fourth I

rejected it and much else loved, until the eyes

teared those last days and the lab phoned.

Back at the clinic—someone’s cheap cologne,

Sunday lamb yet on the tongue, the mind cool as a pitcher

of milk, a woman’s knitting needles aflutter,

Angel’s hand in mine—I watched the verdict-lips move,

rubbed my arm, which, once pricked, had tingled, then bruised.