The hidden wounds

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T h e   U p w a r d   L o o k

Dorn Veterans Hospital

Columbia, South Carolina

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All glass may yet be whole

She thinks, it may be put together

From the deep inner flashing of her face.

One moment the windshield held

The countryside, the green

Level fields and the animals,

And these must be restored

To what they were when her brow

Broke into them for nothing, and began

Its sparkling under the gauze.

Though the still, small war for her beauty

Is stitched out of sight and lost,

It is not this field that she thinks of.

It is that her face, buried

And held up inside the slow scars,

Knows how the bright, fractured world

Burns and pulls and weeps

To come together again.

The green meadow lying in fragments

Under the splintered sunlight,

The cattle broken in pieces

By her useless, painful intrusion

Know that her visage contains

The process and hurt of their healing,

The hidden wounds that can

Restore anything, bringing the glass

Of the world together once more,

All as it was when she struck,

All except her. The shattered field

Where they dragged the telescoped car

Off to be pounded to scrap

Waits for her to get up,

For her calm, unimagined face

To emerge from the yards of its wrapping,

Red, raw, mixed-looking but entire,

A new face, an old life,

To confront the pale glass it has dreamed

Made whole and backed wth wise silver,

Held in other hands brittle with dread,

A doctor's, a lip-biting nurse's,

Who do not see what she sees 

Behind her odd face in the mirror:

The pastures of earth and of heaven

Restored and undamaged, the cattle

Risen out of their jagged graves

To walk in the seamless sunlight

And a newborn countenance

Put upon everything,

Her beauty gone, but to hover

Near for the rest of her life,

And good no nearer, but plainly

In sight, and the only way.

= James Dickey =

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Happy Wednesday