Jigsaw

This is a poem written in my twenties to someone I knew for a very short while. I met him in the lobby of the apartment building we both lived in. We bonded over our mutual loathing of the building's manager. I'd known him for about two months when he went in for an operation to remove his brain tumor. He hadn't lived in Seattle very long and I think I was his only friend. After the operation, I went to visit him in the hospital, where I met his parents. The doctors told him that they'd gotten all but ten percent of the cancer. What they didn't tell him, but told his parents, was that that ten percent was spread throughout his brain and that he had six months to live.

The day his parents told him, a couple of days after he'd gotten out of the hospital, I came home from work and found them sitting in the lobby. He'd kicked them out of his apartment. They told me he wouldn't speak to them. My god, they were so lost! Their pain was just hanging there like a fog in the air around them. I found myself telling them that I'd go talk to him.

The hallway to his apartment is still vivid in my memory. I really didn't know him that well, I had no idea what I could say that his parents couldn't, or, for that matter, why I had volunteered to act as mediator. I remember very carefully not thinking about what I was doing. There just isn't anything in life that prepares most of us for these kind of moments. Sometimes there's nothing to do but move through what we find before us.

I remember knocking on his door, and saying "It's okay, it's me." The door opened, and he let me in and the expression on my face must have been the right one because then he was shaking with his head buried in my neck and I was holding him as tight as I could.

We talked. Mostly he talked and I listened, and eventually I went back to the lobby and told his parents he was okay and would talk to them again. They went to his apartment and I went to mine and shortly after that, they took him home with them and I never saw him again. And shortly after that I moved to another building. 

Sometimes I believe in fate and sometimes I don't. When I do, I think that life threw us together because nobody should have to go through that kind of pain alone. When I don't, I think that if you open yourself to other people, and to whatever life throws you, then sooner or later you're going to find yourself in that kind of situation.

Jigsaw


After the flesh, the bone, 
the ivory talisman bound in nerve and muscle
the jigsaw puzzle piece
lifted from your skull. Your life, naked
and pulsing beneath the surgeon's blade. 


Today the battlefield is clear, your enemy defined, 
where all too often scars remain concealed,
tumors camouflaged in forms 
the x-ray doesn't  register, our battles
blind and blundering, obscure adversaries 
dealing subtle wounds we wrap in words
and bind with ambiguity.  I want to goad you into rage tonight, 
want you to bellow and stomp 
and shake your fist at fate, command you 
not to acquiesce so easily to accident 
and random aberration. Command you 
Don't surrender!


Instead I hold you,  
shuddering, against my throat
where skin and bone become a gauntlet
thrown in the face of all our random enemies, 
and reach for the necessary syllable, 
the talisman to lead you through
victorious and whole 
to a country where the battlefield is silent
the puzzle solved
and words like win or lose, live or die
no longer matter.