Half Life in the Half Light, and: After Infection

118 JASON LABBE HALF LIFE IN THE HALF LIGHT In spring snow it’s difficult to imagine, a bone broken for each year alive instantly maxing out wallets of credit cards. I couldn’t tell you the colors of emergency surgery, I can’t recall signing next to the X—because I never— and so promise to mispronounce pre-certification. I still pause before my name as though asked by a stranger in a dream to approach a black band of water at dusk. The day I glimpsed my X-ray of eighteen broken ribs I plotted to walk the thawing canal, to repeat that trail—it’s absurd—where a sign warns of hostile swans nesting. Today I hike through a squall, and without a hood, my head open to the buds and blossoms in shock. I receive a sky more static than gray, white noise of wind and vapor. I count eighteen sticks snap under my left steps, and I’m home. My fingers numb, I fumble with the light dimmer, then the stereo volume, and with eyes half-closed up my dosage of low frequencies, bass in the chest. Check below the ache in my sternum: I slept through the stitches and woke to a foot-long scar no one can tell me how I’ll pay for. What could I do but steal the scalpel. Now no traffic light halo, no rise in barometric pressure, and no path of black ice can strand me. This improvised power ballad whose words the world must misunderstand loops in my head, around my apartment, around the building, rides off the whitening curb, and laps 119 the block before skidding into a parked delivery truck. But the instrumental version blows straight out of the city and spreads into a colder fringe where my future house glows behind rows of gray trees. 120 JASON LABBE AFTER INFECTION To forget the year of fevers. To enter warm air, endless pathogens. Nothing sterile. The skin not so much a barrier as a membrane the mild breeze blows through. A decasecond of dusk is enough. Swollen sun coming down, the turkey vulture’s swoop behind the pines on the outskirts, all above moving closer to some out-of-view point of ground. To watch. To forget the Era of Lost Sleep after the promised guest never showed. A thin sweat is enough. ...