Trauma Analysis

“daliegt der ganze Unterschied”

How the bones bore it

Holds the clues forensics needs

To tell a sequence,

Which fractures came first 

And how, and was there enough

Time to heal between,

Enough for scarring?

We will begin with a scene

And end with a scene,

Bare-boned narration.

(Between scenes—reconstruction

And exposition.)

Scene one: plump baby 

Crawling through high summer grass,

Gummily grinning,

Halo of dark curls,

Left arm in a plaster cast.

Odd detail, that’s all.

This kid is lucky.

He will get medical care.

He will be well fed.

His bones will be set

By orthopedic surgeons,

Set and set again.

A simple x-ray

Will reveal how well he’s healed

And how many times.

With his parents’ help

He will sail through school, despite

Frequent absences.

He will have options.

He’s a male American.

He’s cheerful. He’s white.

This is not the end.

He will grow up. He will work.

He will marry twice.

The bones keep healing,

The cumulative effect

Twisty nonetheless.

Surgeons add metal.

Surgeons cut old metal out.

Scars get hard to count.

Decades to go yet.

He arrives at fatherhood

Late, but he gets there.

This kid is lucky.

Despite mixed tenses, he finds

Time to read and write.

The forensic arts

Love their counterfactuals.

What would he look like

If reconstructed

As if he’d never broken?

Clean-limbed? Tall? Still white.

This kid is lucky.

The breaks will accumulate 

Irregularly

But regularly

Enough he can recover,

Mostly, between them.

Note the spiral tracks,

The exquisite layering

Of the injuries,

Like a palimpsest 

In which the parchment itself

Scraped away each text,

Not quite completely.

Next to blank reconstructions

Of the unbroken,

The reconstruction

Of the broken is haunted

With whispering ghosts.

And now he’s searching

For a closing scene to show,

But he’s not quite done.

Stories end—lives don’t,

Not while still inside of one.

Present what has been

Or what could happen?

An unusually small man,

Legs like random twigs,

Arms like random twigs,

Makes small hops on black crutches

Through bronze winter grass.