NICOLE CALLIHAN, FEATURED IN THE NEW OCEAN STATE REVIEW
Blood Work
The phlebotomist tells me I’ve gotta lean into the tide.
I turn my head so as not to see the needle go in.
A habit. One of many.
Which tide to lean into?
It’s the next August, what I would have called “a year from
now” a year ago.
If a year ago was a year from now, then.
I’d like to be in the pool with Ella, holding her body to help
her float, watching her bat her eyes at the sun, the sky as blue
as this tourniquet.
Has it passed? Am I through?
I could spend a decade writing odes to the sound of the air
conditioner.
The last time I was in the waiting room, a man in the chair
beside me sketched birds. I’d hoped to see him today.
Or not him, but the birds.
Or not the birds, but the space around them.
Sky as collection of molecules above water, around bird.
What did the drowning woman say to the fish?
Kelp me.
What’s gotten. What’s had. Forgotten. Forhad.
Of my to-dos, I to-did.
Of the tide, my blue intervals vary.
And, really, this tourniquet is just so blue.
Notes on the making of “Blood Work“:
I’m thinking of how images outlast images. I was in a room; a man beside me was sketching birds. I pretended to be looking at my phone. Maybe I was even jotting notes in my phone, notes toward a poem, but really I was watching the man sketch the birds. I wanted to talk to the man, ask him to name the birds for me, ask him how he knows to hold his pencil just so, to shade this wing and that, to leave the space that becomes the air around the bird.
Three months later, I return to the room. It’s clockwork. Every three months, I return to the room. I don’t see the man again, but each time I return, I recall him, or not him, but the birds. Each time, I think he was there the time before, but time piles on itself. He wasn’t here the time before or even the time before that. I scan the room. He’s gone; still, he accompanies me.
It’s March 2022. A year ago, I would have called this “a year from now.” Two years ago, I would have called this “two years from now,” but I would’ve spoken of it in a different voice, I think. It would have been before the pandemic, before isolation, before the deaths of a handful of folks who figure in my life, before the diagnosis, the double mastectomy, the radiation, the walking into the room every three months for blood work, the room itself, the man with his sketchpad, the phlebotomist, the missed afternoon in the swimming pool with my daughter, the kelp; now, even, the war.
How do poems get made? How does anything get made in a world that feels increasingly bleak? Where did the man go? Has it passed? Am I through?
When Charles gave me the opportunity to think more about the making of this poem, I thought it would be easy to unearth the first draft. I knew I’d started writing it on my phone in the very waiting room where the man no longer was. I opened my notes and did a search for “phlebotomist;” here’s what I found:
The phlebotomist tells me she likes my blouse.
It’s my color, she says.
I go on to riff on blue: the blue of toilet water, certain starlings, gas fires, delphinium, my eldest daughter’s eyes, robin’s eggs, sea holly, glory of the snow, the mole of a lover I had in my twenties, back to the toilet water. My refrain, in fact, is: And the toilet water is blue. And the toilet water is blue.
Why, I wonder, did the blue toilet water mean so much to me that I repeated it, and why, if it meant so much to me did it not end up in the poem? What do we hold onto? What do we let go of? And then, there in my notes, it’s not the phlebotomist who tells me to lean into the tide but the nurse.
I’ve never been one who keeps a journal. The idea of documenting my days feels boring and tedious, and yet, especially in the past decade, I’ve come to believe that the only way I can mark time is through poems. I know how I was feeling a particular day last August because I made this poem then. Or did I make it then? Might I have finished it in September? Is it more a product of last September than last August? Does it matter?
It’s so inexact and mysterious this world of making. It’s not the birds, but the space around them, not the days, but the air through which I moved to get from one to the next. C.D. Wright described poetry as “the very lining of the inner life.” And I think this is true. Poetry seems to me to be the inner life grafted onto the physicality of time and space; the sketched birds, that oh so blue tourniquet, the woman speaking to the fish; all of these, and all of these accompanied by that which inevitably accompanies them.
When I read “Blood Work” back to myself, I can feel both the ache and pleasure in my hope that there might be a whole decade where I do nothing but write odes to the sound of the air conditioner, that air conditioner, that August day’s hum. All of which, I think, is to say: I’m not sure how anything gets made, but I’m certainly grateful for the making.
Nicole Callihan writes poems and stories. Her books include SuperLoop and the poetry chapbooks: A Study in Spring (with Zoë Ryder White, 2015), The Deeply Flawed Human (2016), Downtown (2017), Aging (2018), and ELSEWHERE (with Zoë Ryder White, 2020). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, The American Poetry Review, and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets. Her novella, The Couples, was published by Mason Jar Press in summer 2019. Find her at www.nicolecallihan.com.