Narrative on Phantom Limbs
Kat Stromquist
– for K.
“I could have lost my arm,” you say,
half-past asleep in our sweat-rich sheets.
You’ve never told me this, before.
I imagine it: the pinned sleeve’s visible
tragedy, the glances from strangers,
your quietness with a different color.
*
I was twenty when I wrote a poem
about mutilation and disability, after
a friend was nearly killed in a car wreck.
He spent two months in a coma, unstable,
his legs and arms immobilized in traction,
a ventilator rhyming with his ribcage.
*
In your favorite book, The Razor’s Edge,
the protagonist, Larry, changes
after flying a plane in the first World War.
Something happens in expansive skies,
and Larry comes home strange, muted.
He breaks his engagement, goes to Paris.
*
We were drinking coffee in Morocco
when we saw a dog with a broken leg
half-heartedly chasing a dinged-up car.
Noticing us, it limped over, licked
your outstretched hand. I looked at
its halo of flies, your absent petting.
*
I trace your scars in bed, thick
knots grapefruit-colored
on your elbow and forearm.
I’ve never told you how I heard
about your accident: from someone else.
About who was driving, the anguish after.
*
After my friend left the hospital,
I came home to the city where he and I
grew up. He stuttered with a cane
on icy driveways, tottered, got lost
in time and touched me in places
that no longer felt appropriate.
*
From Paris, Larry travels to India,
meditates, approaches transcendence.
Probably the author takes liberties
with reality—how unlikely anyone
could recover so completely,
trauma shrugged off like a gesture.
*
Africa: after two seven-hour bus rides
and cement rooms without windows,
we got sick near the Sahara.
I thought of being buried in the desert.
Feverish, I groped the sheets,
searching for your unfound hand.
*
You roll over, thin chest falling
with steady breaths,
your silent voice. I think of your arm
swollen, bone-sawed, what you carry
like a prosthesis. What was she like?
No one I love has ever died.