To a Limited Extent, and: Radiology
Rent from DeepDyve- To a Limited Extent, and: Radiology
To a Limited Extent
it's not about how far you fallbut how: you could break a legby missing what you'd barely calla height, like the bottom step,
your mind on another planet,your body dully at home, movinglaundry or a chair. The damagemay be minor, but it quietly ruins
your plans. Never again, you say,shall I carry laundry or a chair.For a time you don't, until the dayyou have to strive again, to scale
the hill or wall that is the ground,though still you'd prefer not to leadthis march. Others have renouncedmuch more. Everyone needs
to be inert sometimes; you can sit outfurther rounds. But being too strongenables hope to entwine with doubtso that both can prove you wrong:
where others would have given into joy's unreasonable limits,you who were always too disciplinedat managing life, managed to miss it. [End Page 53]
Radiology
When the tech starts asking questions—"Where'd you go to school?" "Whatdo you teach?"—I brace for astonishmentthat it's English, not math or Chinese, but
she registers plain delight I'm a writer.There must be no one in Radiologyto talk to. She seems to hope I can tell hera story, but all I can muster is the anxiety
that trailed the impact, a week ago, and recallhow I sat with the coldest object I could find,a bottle of water, on my head—no physicalache of blood or bone, only the dread my mind
unleashed, its fortresses leveled by the blow.I knew, without reason, he'd soon be gone,everything canceled, the future mine, althoughwe'd mapped it together: oceans, mountains,
avenues. Season of flower, season of ice—wherever I wanted, he was going to take me.The radiologist hopes I'll talk about my life.All I can offer is, "I thought bodily injury
wouldn't ruin my work—I make my livingwith my mind—but then I hit my head,"at which she morphs into an angel, admitting,"We aren't in control of our destiny," the best
small talk I've had all week. All the talk is smallcompared to what he's going to say, the momenthe's able. Half an hour later, the nurses callme over: the scan has revealed no fragments [End Page 54]
of bone. I know they were fragments of grief,not bone. I must have wept them out that daywhen he hurried over with ice in a clothand wrapped me in his arms, not quite the way
he would a few days later, when he no longerloved me—out of ordinary human sentiment,the way you'd put your arms around a strangeryou've found at the scene of an accident:
commonly, to keep her warm for the interimuntil, having moments ago entered your life,she passes back out of it without a nameand into that of the first paramedic to arrive.
Adrienne Su has recent poems in Northwest Review, Asian American Literary Review, Green Mountains Review, and Cerise Press. She has received an nea fellowship. Her third book, Having None of It, was published recently by Manic D Press.
