Grey Night, Grey Day

When I slipped out of time,
it was a slow getaway, stretchered
by illness, like a low-slung red horizon.

God wanted this: my brain besieged,
my heart broken. Let it break, he said,
dropping my world like an old glass ball,

or a raindrop in a storm of thousands.
With pleasure, he added and I thought
of my son knocking my last marble

out of a mystic circle he toed in dirt.
While I searched, fruitlessly, under trees
whose leaves were full of lush emanations,

my son, absentmindedly, made up a song,
thinking more important things.
And it shall not be healed, God said,

loud enough for everyone on the neurology pod
to hear, but I, stripped of my headdress
of e.e.g. leads was tending to my roommate-

blind, confused - who screamed for the nurse,
unable, ever, to find the call button.
I placed the foam slippers with smiley faces

on her feet, adjusted blankets, calmed her,
then padded back to bed, hugging
my son's Christmas bear through seizure

after seizure - my son, whose hypothesis
and drawing (at 7) of my brain's illness
had been included in my chart.

Outside my window, grey night, grey day
erased God's words like an old lesson
on a chalkboard and in my brain, green-

glorious dreams, impregnated by its storms,
arose, punctuated by my roommate's screams.
I knew the star charts were coming

and my soul would be wrapped in one,
hushed, aglow. I knew Kirschnerian Kyries
began in the e.r. and above me or below me, women,

ordinary women, pushed their babies out in
gushes of blood. I dreamed my brain
was algae rising like bursts of yeast

upon a summer pond, algae I wet my hands in,
sliding aside its shimmering curtain
to watch drowsy salamanders as though each

slipped from my womb tasting of sunrise.
When I told the neurologists how the bower bird

loves blue and the tree toad has gold gilt,
like ancient kohl, around its eyes, they sadly
shook their heads, stepped out of the mystic circle,
wherein I slid back out of time, knowing

hearts long broken, give in, give over, give.