My family raised me a skeptic of disease,
an atheist scornful of diagnostic gods,
and Hippocratic demagogues who would ensnare us
in fear of a treacherous body.
Infection’s perfidy, we knew, was cheap suspense
like any flimsy drugstore paperback,
like Gideons’ gift to weakened travelers.
We respectfully knew not to lambast the medical tradition,
but it wasn’t ours for use. It belongs to foreign realms,
where holy books of clinical narrative knit up the parts
of anatomical mystery into ethnic motifs:
Avicenna’s Pahlavi patterned roots,
wax cloth animalcules of Leeuwenhoek,
Vesalius’ woven Fabrica Corporis Humani.
Artifacts of the culturally early.
Enchanted modern minds still literarily tour the halls of Kos,
but remember this asklepeion has met Atlantis’ fate.
Too much love for myth bespeaks the folly of
malingerers, of fools.
Wise folk put those mad compendiums away.
I huddle in a bedsheet tent, flashlight turned
to pale my face, to mimic death’s angelic visitation,
my body transformed into a text of fantastical plague
I will read after dark and in secret.
One hand to my chest to catch the shudders
of elaborate coughing, such hellhound barks
that rattle my bedframe’s brass knobs.
I am hot in the bright with a countenance of fever,
so I prey on my health for deliverance,
honing the taboo art of summoning
the Catarrh demon for testament
to my possession by mortal ills.
They’ve denied that I’m sick for years, by now,
but I believe, I believe, I believe…
Yes, the skeptical method trumps all superstition,
and we soberly forfeit those childish things.
No Pasteurian oracle of etiologies can foretell
the body’s sovereign courses,
no pharmic idolatry procures
the myopic dreams of men.
Paracelsus’ opiates shall never
be suffered to dull the reckonings
of nature in we who are
fearfully and wonderfully made.
