Dead Languages by David Shields

Author:David Shields [Shields, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary
ISBN: 9781555970307
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 1986-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

16

THE REASON WHY it was not just one more broken leg, why I imbue it with significance, is that I was never again able to play competitive sports. Two months in traction and nine more in a metal leg brace nullified whatever dreams I still had of becoming an athlete and forced me into finding another way of ordering my world. Phrasemaker that she was, Mother called this the silver lining of a very black cloud. I still believed in love at first sight, the ultimate triumph of political justice, and the consolation of beautiful language.

Conventional wisdom has it that poetry begins when the pain or at least the boredom gets intolerable. Conventional wisdom has it right for once, since immediately after dispensing with the last of sophomore year course work I commenced to write the first and last series of poems I’ve ever written, a satirical sonnet sequence too pathetic to look at again, even here. I took as the subjects of the Hospital Cycle the standard themes of convalescent life—the cold doctor, the cheerful nurses, the bland food, the tedious visitor—whereas what I wanted to write about was the sound of the little Korean woman’s voice when she entered the room at sunrise, selling papers, screeching “Chron-eee-cle, Chron-eee-cle,” as if she were consciously attempting to reproduce in her intonation the undesirability of morning and irritability of the world.

In July I began purchasing the newspaper from her because I could no longer abide the sound of her voice and wanted to dismiss her, with a ten-cent tip, as quickly as I possibly could, but also because I was becoming increasingly interested in the adventures of Thomas Eagleton. There I was, flat on my back in a body cast from chest to toes, and there he was: Poor Tom, wearing checkered sportcoats, running around getting assurances, sweating on national television, crying, hugging his wife, having that dead metaphor “skeletons in his closet” applied to him so often that I came to think of him carrying, quite literally, a little closet wherever he went, with a plastic skeleton dangling from a coat hanger. My curiosity about Poor Tom derived, I suppose, from Father, to whom he represented the Right of the Electrically Shocked to Live without Shame.

Father would come visit me on his lunch hour, shaking his head, licking his lips, complaining of a muscle he’d pulled when he tried to sprint the final 440 of a five-mile jog. Upon entering the room he’d rattle the bed frame, which was meant as a gesture of paternal jocularity. He would sit in a metal chair with his arms folded and sunglasses on, as if he were blind, criminally suspect, or excruciatingly shy: looking straight ahead, saying nothing. But then the noon news would come on, Poor Tom would appear, and we’d start exchanging information from magazine articles and reports we’d heard on the radio. In that there was nothing in the least heroic about him, Poor Tom was an unlikely hero, but

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