A ribcage full of songbirds

Back in 1996, my Ground Hog's Day was interrupted. I was a passenger in a head-on car collision that, thankfully, everyone lived through. The event did, however, have some dire consequences. The driver went to the hospital with fractured vertebrae, and I cracked two of my left-side ribs. About three weeks after the accident, a guy I worked with said something that made me laugh, and one of the ribs broke all the way through. As I hit the ground, screaming, I remember thinking, "How can there be so much pain in me right now?"

Cleaning out some old boxes today, I ran across this, which I wrote a couple months after the accident, looking back at it. I've been dead-dog sick with the 'flu these past five days, and this seemed somehow fitting - so I thought I would share it. We are fragile things. That is what makes the preciousness of all these breaths so monstrously beautiful.

2.2.96: Invitation to the last dance. The life flashes later. All that hung in the air at that moment was clarity. Transparency. Lichtung. Giving over the body to limp buoyancy. Life collapses.

What we held, what we thought we held: these were not the same. No matter. There are certain points of inevitable closure. Boom.

At that point I was limp trusting; no other description is adequate. Later, in the hospital, fearful over Kay, the driver, I watched it on the news. It wasn't the same as being there. It never is.

Decode this, then. A haunting of memory acid-etched into the body. So many choices have passed with no consequence before this, inevitable and unchangeable. How un-American it feels to be burdened: to carry a moment, one moment, for the rest of your life.

Every medium of conduction has its own factor of resistance. Circumscribe with mathematics, enlist physics, demand a clarity mere words cannot provide. But when such a pure transparency is achieved, what is seen? How clean the glass before it shatters?

So, left with moments incestuously entwined with-us, to re-learn the language of breaking points, tolerances. So. leaving the clean, broken glass, but carrying the breaking with us. For we, like glass, are dust put to purposes and pressures; liquid, brittle, revealing. We yearn ourselves to transparency. We hope, at last, to see through this; even this.