He will not light long enough
for the interpreter to gather
the tatters of his speech.
But the longer we listen
the calmer he becomes.
He shows me the place where his daughter
has rubbed with a coin, violaceous streaks
raising a skeletal pattern on his chest.
He thinks he's been hit by the wind.
He's worried it will become pneumonia.
In Cambodia, he'd be given
a special tea, a prescriptive sacrifice,
the right chants to say. But I
know nothing of Chi, of Karma,
and ask him to lift the back of his shirt,
so I may listen to his breathing.
Holding the stethoscope's bell I'm stunned
by the whirl of icons and script
tattooed across his back, their teal green color
the outline of a map which looks
like Cambodia, perhaps his village, a lake,
then a scroll of letters in a watery signature.
I ask the interpreter what it means.
It's a spell, asking his ancestors
to protect him from evil spirits—
she is tracing the lines with her fingers—
and those who meet him for kindness.
The old man waves his arms and a staccato
of dipthongs and nasals fills the room.
He believes these words will lead his spirit
back to Cambodia after he dies.
I see, I say, and rest my hand on his shoulder.
He takes full deep breaths and I listen,
touching down with the stethoscope
from his back to his front. He watches me
with anticipation—as if awaiting a verdict.
His lungs are clear. You'll be fine,
I tell him. It's not your time to die.
His shoulders relax and he folds his hands
above his head as if in blessing.
Ar-kon, he says. All better now.
by Peter Pereira
.
Peter Pereira (b. 1959)
Peter Pereira is a physician, a poet, and the founder of Floating Bridge Press. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and several anthologies, including Best American Poetry and To Come to Light: Perspectives on Chronic Illness in Modern Literature. He has received the “Discovery”/The Nation and Hayden Carruth prizes, and has been a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.
His poems are marked by their wit, humane observations, and range of both form and subject. In his chapbook, The Lost Twin (2000), and two full-length collections, Saying the World (2003) and What’s Written on the Body (2007), he seamlessly traverses his favorite themes, which include his work as a primary care provider at an urban clinic in Seattle, domestic life, suffering and the human condition, and the slippage of language.
He is as comfortable with free-verse narratives as he is with anagrams, and Gregory Orr calls him “a master of many modes, all of them yielding either wisdom or delight.” Edward Byrne has praised his formal innovations, “inventive use of language,” and “unexpected” juxtapositions. Pereira’s investigations have a prevailing undercurrent of celebration in the tradition of Walt Whitman, and even his deepest explorations of suffering are likely to be suffused with humour or hope.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/peter-pereira