I had my first acupuncture session last night. It was a start. I go back tomorrow for round two as Dr. Cai works on breaking up the marble slab that has become by back, shoulders and neck.
While I was lying on the table trying to meditate and keep my head clear, this poem from my first mentor, the late Len Roberts popped in my head. It’s the lead poem in his book The Trouble-Making Finch (U. of Illinois Press, 1998):
“Acupuncture and Cleansing at Forty-Eight”
No longer eating meat or dairy
products or refined sugar,
I lie on the acupuncturist’s
mat stuck with twenty
needles and know a little how
Saint Sebastian felt with those
arrows
piercing him all over, his poster
tacked to the wall before my fourth-
grade desk
as I bent over the addition and loss,
tried to find and name the five oceans,
seven continents,
drops of blood with small windows of
light strung
from each of his wounds, blood like
the blood on my mother’s pad the day
she hung
it before my face and said I was making
her bleed to death,
blood like my brother’s that day
he hung from the spiked barb
at the top of the fence,
a railroad track of stitches gleaming
for years on the soft inside of his arm,
blood like today when Dr. Ming extracts
a needle and dabs
a speck of red away, one from my eyelid,
one from my cheek,
the needles trying to open my channels
of chi,
so I can sleep at night without choking,
so I don’t have to fear waking my wife
hawking the hardened mucus out,
so I don’t have to lie there thinking
of those I hate, of those who have died,
the needles
tapped into the kidney point, where
memories reside,
tapped into the liver point, where
poisons collect,
into the feet and hands, the three
chakra of the chest
that split the body in half, my right
healthy, my left in pain,
my old friend’s betrayal lumped in my
neck,
my old love walking away thirty years
ago
stuck in my lower back, father’s death,
mother’s
lovelessness lodged in so many parts
It may takes years, Dr. Ming whispers,
to wash them out,
telling me to breathe deep, to breathe
hard,
the body is nothing but a map of the
heart.