A conjunction of bone photos

1. A sentence
‘Please only open one drawer at a time
or the whole thing might collapse.’

But the surgery looks secure
though I can’t address the ground.
Something grabbed my ankle
choking tendons and blood
and the sentence, formerly hidden,
is writ visible, risen through layers
from bone nudging nerves.
It says: the ground has fallen away
a long time ago.

The young doctor has a Christ
postered on the wall:
I am, I am, I am the way.
And you wonder what I am?
And where the ground went.
He wants me to make friends
with radiation.

My foot is placed
at various longitudes, latitudes
not freedom to move.
At each placement the tiny god
in the machine blinks
and some mystery in me is revealed:
I have a leg to stand on.
I am a machine of bone and flex.
Once or twice it seems
waiting for the bone photos
I am in pain but that disappears
into carpet, lost in public necessities.

The doctor reads me, his pen
follows a line across my instep
to my ankle. The sentence
is a good one, with mitigation.
No asprin, it thins the blood
I must be thickly grounded.
But it’s also a dialogue –
I must elevate. This push-pull
ballet of cures
here underneath Dr Jesus.
I accept it like a lamb.
I am a way out of here.

2. A plate
Second surgery is labyrinth
astringent alcohol breath
dark paper gowns, the many rooms
where flesh becomes transparent,
an intimate kind of meat.

I am being made ready,
a plate must be got
on a second’s outbreath,
perfect snaps, maps of my expeditions
conjunctions. maladjustments.
It’s the core this time,
the spine’s steps of bone
its mats of muscle, their tenderness
my pattern for this time.

I have to trust the machine
its straight steel limbs, electric veins
its gurgling inner works
and its flat square eye.

I will peer at the window
of it, search the contrast of it,
wonder at all that final stillness
the round hip joint, the slightly
left-leaning spine.
It is forced and arranged,
and strangely beautiful.
And it never stops the ache
or gags the years.