The Man in the Iron Lung

Feb 14 2019

More and more often, I feel

I'm the man in the iron lung.

Enclosed

from the neck up

in this barrel-shaped vault;

a centaur-like creature

who is mostly machine

with a body of tubular steel.

Where the wheezing in-and-out

of its life-giving pump

has become so regular

I only hear it when it fails.

And where compressed air

weighs down on my chest

for 20 hours a day;

my vital source of breath

that could suffocate, just as well.

It's disconcerting

how a body too infirm to move

can experience such exquisite sensation;

on my bird-like ribs

and legs like stilts

and the virgin soles of my feet,

the private parts

I cannot even see.

How a body desires

but ends up consigned

to a prison it has made of itself.

An act of God?

Or the negligence of my younger self

who let a virus enter?

Who walled-off the world,

evicting himself

from all its earthly pleasures.

Its highs, as well as its lows,

its joys

and accompanying sorrows.

Only my head sits free

of this big metal tank

in a room I know by heart.

Where I watch

as if from behind unbreakable glass;

my heavy extremities

the itch I cannot scratch,

the unquenchable heat

I feel ashamed to ask.

It seems like an artifact

of the early days of medicine,

a loud clumsy machine

of heavy welded steel.

Iron horse, iron lung, iron man.

From before we had conquered nature

      . . . or at least, thought we had.

But nature persists in us all,

and who we are

is inviolable.

Like the will to survive.

Like the urgent drive

to take another breath.

Like the small contorted homunculus

who lives deep down inside

and never lets you forget.

I just watched a brilliant touching movie called The Sessions, starring John Hawkes, Helen Hunt, and William H. Macey. It's the story of a man who contracted polio as a child and is confined to an iron lung.

He lives in his head. He is a poet. He is a sweet and funny man, who appears to have conquered bitterness and resentment. But he is a devout Catholic, carries baggage from his past family life, and struggles with guilt, shame, and recrimination. He yearns to live fully, and feels unrequited desire: for physical touch ...for sex ...for love.

Anyway, as I watched, I felt like I was the man in the iron lung; if an iron lung of my own making. After sleeping on it for a night, this poem came to me, and pretty much wrote itself. If my poetry tends to be bloodless and wary of the confessional, then this may be one of the rare exceptions.