I am sick

Wednesday 7 January 2009

This is a poem my stepmother wrote when she was 15 and staying with us as an exchange student. She had been sick for about three days-- blaming it on this weird American climate, I am sure! --and being the genius that she is she was able to depict the mad delirium of a high fever with a such wonder and compassion that anyone can feel her sense of utter helplessness... 'an intelligent being laid low in infirmity'.

I was of course by no means as sick as this yesterday (just had a tummy-ache and sleeping most of the day helped) but I think of this poem often and thought I might share it in my blog.

...

Lewes, Delaware
24-26 September 1997

I am sick.

Deprived of energy, devoid of strength, depraved of will,
enveloped in the strange world of the fever
where temperature
and density
and thirst
and aches throughout my body
are all my sensation.

Eyes water,
with a stinging sadness;
I weep for pain, or to relieve pain, I know not;
so I shut them:
I see not.

Ears rumble,
thick and loud like thunder upon my head;
and so I ignore everything:
I hear not.

Mouth burns,
with a hot anxious constriction,
every swallow a briar down my throat;
and so I dare not part my lips:
I speak not.

I know nothing, feel nothing, want nothing,
but from within.


I rest.

Stretched upon this couch with hands crossed above my chest,
like a Queen in state,
dead to the world behind the rosecoloured glasses
of my mad mind's eye.

My head spins,
slow, dull spirals downward, ever downward,
with no end in sight.

Unworldly thoughts drift by,
like vagrants from the city street
with nowhere to call home
but the vague recesses of my mind
where they beck and call to me,
nagging, nagging, nagging,
for answers I cannot provide
like strange alien torture
to an intelligent being
unused to grave weakness
laid low in involuntary infirmity.

When I am strong enough to reply
they will be gone,
unanswered, eternally a mystery
why they ever appeared and posed a question.

That they would be gone,
I try to imagine things of my own will
as if to show my waylaid mind
that I still have control.

But my will is but a page
against the army of my sickness.

Little girls run hand-in-hand to the beach:
their vivid colours searing in my sight,
their bright voices piercing in my ears,
their happiness incomprehensible.

What girls?
What beach? What colours? What words?

Boys hang a swing in a tree,
dangling daringly above the ground
like dauntless acrobats,
dizzying to me,
frightening to me.

What boys? What tree? What swing?
Is it sunny? Cloudy? Cold? Warm?
Day? Night? Dream? Reality?

Angry, I demand an image
of the swells of the sea
rising and falling with animate regularity,
that it might be a lovely vision of contentment.

But not for me.

What sea? What colour?
What weather-- sunny, hot, cold, wind, calm, rain, day, night?
Am I afraid or at ease?
Am I happy or sad?
Do I swim or sail?
Would I drown? Would I care?

Can I ever know rest with these questions in my head?

For the first time in my life
I take sleeping-tablets
and worry that I have taken too much
and that the last tenants of my mind
are these wild tortured contrivances of my madness.


I sleep.

Still they will not leave me,
haunting my repose
like pins and needles upon the receptors of my brain
nagging me, nagging me, nagging me
that they have required my soul
at a cost too dear
to make Death itself look awful to me.

Eternal sleep:
would that it might overwhelm me!
like a kind dream
in which I know no sickness, no weakness, no madness,
only sleep, beautiful sleep,
floating upon some buoyant bright cloud
while all the saints smile and whisper,
'Isn't she content?'

There I might know no weakness or infirmity,
no sensations,
not even my own mind,
only peace.


I wake.

Joyful sunlight bounces in the windows;
I hear the cheers of the sea-birds
and the gay whistle of the kettle
and I embrace the loving scent of soup on the cooker.

I am warm-- nay, hot,
and toss back the coffin of my blanket,
drained, but refreshed
despite the soilies so vile upon my body
and the knots of my hair resisting my hand's tenuous rake.

Sweat clings like some horrid vine about my skin
but I can sense it
and dislike it
and know it for what it is,
the last vestige of my illness,
that mad mindless state
in which I lay for three days' fast
like a forgotten doll upon the couch.

I wonder what I have missed of the world
and then, care not
for I have survived,
and can face anything now
that I have my mind again.

...