- Occupations
It is the surgeon's job to find the place where the flesh will part
and to put the scalpel inthe absence—to fill it,under the spotlight,
with a medical grade radiance. I knowthe story of exponential growth.
It is in my head—when everything else is there too
and when everything else is no longer relevant. I worry
an abscess until its thin membrane bursts against my tongue.
My mouth's pink surgeon, when my brainromps through its various anesthesias,
relaxes into the easy chairof my incisors and hard palate. Does it
know I could slice it in half if the surgeontouches me just right? Does it know how
dark a room must get before the objects within it cease to be?
My room is never that dark.I lie there with John, debatingwhether the chair in the corner
is a noiseless crouching shadow that waits for us
to sleep or a chair on the other side of the room piled with clothes or a chair
possessed and ready to split its seat and swallow us whole. [End Page 25]
It is the brain's job to find what it wantsin the world, and so it does.
The brain takes us down the corridor to the garden
in the alley, where the ground turns from soil to the wind-
fluttering stillness of a flock of dead birds, where it is
the body's job to step out and findthe error, to correct it before it rootsinto the deepest corners
of the brain and anchors itself there.It wants to convince us the wreckage
of thought is itself a shadow in the cornerof the eye the operating theatre makes
when a quick twitch could burst a body into absence, and it does. [End Page 26]
Brian Clifton drives an hour to campus. He thinks traffic can be soothing. His work can be found in: Pleiades, Guernica, Cincinnati Review, Salt Hill, Prairie Schooner, The Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other magazines. He is an avid record collector and curator of curiosities.