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Amputation
After that surgery, my name seemed to me to be no more than a
loose rubric under which at intervals, aspects of myself
occasionally reassembled and functioned.
— Larry McMurtry
After drugging and cutting,
split sinews, veins lopped to tree-stumps,
he finds one unplanned side effect:
amputation of his given name.
He dreams in the colors of pain: red bands
over his eyes battle black sunspots.
Half-awake, nerve-cords loosed
from their mooring, he collects
arms or legs for shocked instants,
and, blinking in blood-mist, gropes
along a strange street each house
like the others, iodine brown,
same spread of corners and lines.
No numbers or door-signs, box
follows box; no bell chimes;
none answers his timid knock.
In this town names are snipped away
by slow scissors that twitch across
the fabric of sleep; frayed clouds
blur the edge of the wound.
Who are you? echoes in a blind space
not yet packed with gauze, not filled in
with the seeping ooze of identity.
. . . . . . .
D. A. Feinfeld
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