Acupuncture

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.