Poem - “Hirudo Medicinalis”

It is hard to be misunderstood. 

And how many of us get vindication 

after a century or so?

–

I mistook the little bloodsucker 

for a wad of gauze as it whirled 

from the sailor’s spliced thumb. 

–

It became an iridescent helix, 

a liquid amber’s leaf 

dangling through a day-long 

–

spring and fall and spring. 

Have you ever taken God’s name 

in vain? Forgotten all your Latin 

–

but opiate and parasite, believe 

it’s God who eats at our table? 

The sailor calls his savior Fat Albert. 

–

“C’mon, there you go,” he soothes. 

“Fix me all over, fix my heart, fix everything 

around me.” What carries us forward, 

–

when I enter the room, 

is the blankness – the sheets, 

the walls, the page. 

–

Language itself is prophylactic. 

It avails us, suspends the hours 

for us, inscribes our intentions, 

–

seams the ordinary, provides 

for the whiting in which, in this case, 

the sailor and I can make our poem. 

–

His poem is about wholeness and joy. 

Mine is about the illusion of linear 

progress, about Albert spinning 

–

his symbiotic segments as he waits 

in his salty pyx, both host and communicant, 

the three of us chanting the same poem.

–

“Hirudo Medicinalis” from The Diener. Copyright © 2015 by Martha Serpas. Reprinted by permission of LSU Press. See lsupress.org.