Musculature
By Katie Hartsock
That’s beautiful, my endo said,
examining my graph
of glucose levels on a day
I never went above
one-forty, or below eighty-five:
a more or less straight line
in a report which often reminds
us diabetics, and
our doctors, of a roller coaster
with hills and dips of high
and low blood sugars. But this horizon
was my sculpture, made
intently as a tricky drive
where many turns are missed,
made intensely as love with one
you will not see again,
in a body that would have perished years
ago, if not for the invention
of artificial insulin.
Arte factus, “made
with skill.” If I could reproduce
such minimalist lines
every day, I’d never die.
Call it curated. Call
it radical. Call its excess
Whitmanian, this blood
sugar of mine, that loafs at its ease
and sometimes in largesse.
I saw a colossal statue once,
the Farnese Hercules,
and stood eye-level to his quads.
He held behind his back
the apple he tricked his way into winning,
like I trick my way into living.
It’s all a little Sisyphean.
His apple must return
to the garden; always I’m measuring
another dose, hoping
it’s right, just like my pancreas
would do if it could again—
an enchanted tree welcoming home
a plucked-off piece of fruit,
regrowing the stem into its branch
so even the sepals shone
golden as an evening nymph.
I heard our hired guide,
a Ray-Banned Neapolitan,
explain the hero’s muscles
are so exaggerated here
he couldn’t walk if he came
alive; his body wouldn’t work
one labor, lift a feather,
would just collapse into a pile
of useless hunkitude.
What if my touch, auto-immune,
could whittle him human:
file down biceps, inflate the furrows,
flat as a prophet envisioned
the world—every valley shall be
filled in, every mountain
and hill made low. As if we would
be good, all good, remade
to live smooth as that landscape, where
I’d never want to walk.
Image:
Max Ernst ( 1891-1976)
Garden of the Hesperides
1934
Oil on canvas