Yardstick Richard Siken

Above the hospital, the moon kept shining. I wasn’t anywhere and I couldn’t describe it, I couldn’t stay awake. I mumbled. I stuttered. I crashed the words together or trailed off. I couldn’t say it straight so I tried saying around it—dark-struck, slumber-felt, sleep-clogged. My glasses were broken and my eyes wouldn’t resolve. My stomach was bruised from the Heparin shots. I turned in sleep, shouldering into the dark, glossy water. I practiced connecting. I measured the gaps. I started new dreams without finishing the last, sifting in sleep what I couldn’t sift in daylight. I jumped from house to house, through iterations of myself. My memories were inaccurate and out of order. They did not accumulate. What had made things follow had come apart and the coming apart was no longer interesting. To link it up, to milk the cow and show the math to make the butter, to describe the greened field, trampled or untrampled, was beyond me. Someone came every hour to check my blood pressure. I would raise my arm for the cuff without fully waking. My brother called. I told him not to come. I wasn’t sure who he was and I wouldn’t be able to fake it. I couldn’t lie and I couldn’t track. I made sentences but I couldn’t remember them. It made me unreliable. It was uncomfortable to watch. I blathered in loops—repetitive, elliptical. I was overly invested and empathetically blurry. I had lost my poker face, my guile, and I was in danger of betraying my secrets and everyone else’s. The bed was uncomfortable. I was heavy. I was bricks. Above the bed, the ceiling and the stars. Below the bed the floor, the earth, then out the other side and stars. I fell in all directions.