A long, long time ago I had a boyfriend who was a big fan of Michael Ondaatje. Maybe you recognize this author's name, maybe you don't. He is the author of the book The English Patient. I was so glad that this boyfriend was so ga-ga for Ondaatje because I managed to read the book before the movie came out and everyone insisted I HAD to watch it. (That is likely a subject for another post - how I feel about being told I "HAVE TO" or "MUST" read or watch something. Spoiler alert: I don't respond well). I fell in love with Ondaatje's prose, and then I fell in love with his poetry. In the book The Cinnamon Peeler there are two poems that hit me in the solar plexus: "The Cinnamon Peeler" and "The Time Around Scars". Here is a link to "The Cinnamon Peeler".
And here is "The Time Around Scars":
A girl whom I've not spoken to
or shared coffee with for several years
writes of an old scar.
On her wrist it sleeps, smooth and white,
the size of a leech.
I gave it to her
brandishing a new Italian penknife.
Look, I said turning,
and blood spat onto her shirt.
My wife has scars like spread raindrops
on knees and ankles,
she talks of broken greenhouse panes
and yet, apart from imagining red feet,
(a nymph out of Chagall)
I bring little to that scene.
We remember the time around scars,
they freeze irrelevant emotions
and divide us from present friends.
I remember this girl's face,
the widening rise of surprise.
And would she
moving with lover or husband
conceal or flaunt it,
or keep it at her wrist
a mysterious watch.
And this scar I then remember
is medallion of no emotion.
I would met you now
and I would wish this scar
to have been given with
all the love
that never occurred between us.
***
I have a scar on my back that I love. I got it nearly three years ago when I had a fatty tumor removed. It is about two thirds of the way down my back on the right side, nearly to the side of my torso. There is a lot of emotion around this scar. On the day that I had the surgery, a time in which I joked nearly constantly with the surgeon, I came out of her office to find I had received a job offer for teaching. I was so excited, I wanted to jump up and down but couldn't because I had just had surgery. This was the job that eventually led to me becoming a shell of my former self, so now there is another layer of emotion in retrospect.
Later I had such outrageous pain in the incision site that I went back to the surgeon and found out I had blood clots developing there. She cut open some stitches and squeezed out them out. It was unbelievably painful. I might actually compare it to the pain of squeezing one of my children out of my body. I'm not exaggerating. And, just like when I squeezed out my kids, once the clots were out, I felt such euphoric relief that I nearly swooned. She kept the stitches open so I could take care of the clots on my own.
I could tell when a clot was developing when I felt a tingle of tightening and then a growing pressure. When one did (which happened about once a day at first, then became less often as time passed), I admit to being a bit excited. I would go to the bathroom to watch in the mirror as I squeezed my fingers along the incision to push the clot to the open end. And when it came out? Hoooweee, boy! The clot would pop out first, followed by a small burst of blood thinned out with some other bodily liquid. I would watch it run down my back, and then I'd clean it all up. Each time I experienced the minor agony of the clot moving inside my body and then the minor euphoria of release. Steve observed once or twice when I thought I needed a little help. He didn't enjoy this process in quite the same way I did.
Eventually the clots stopped developing and my skin knitted back together. The scar that was left is not very pretty. I call it my "shark bite", and I love it. I love it precisely because of what Ondaatje says in his poem: it is a medallion of emotion. I tend to have a lot of emotions anyway, but this shark bite on my back is a localized, physical reminder of pain, pleasure, humor, and excitement. It still tingles a bit to this day. Maybe there is one last tiny blood clot still trapped below the surface. (Don't worry: they are not the kind that could go traveling to my lungs and cause a pulmonary embolism; I asked the doc about that).
I get the sense that Ondaatje wishes that he could have had more involvement with his wife's scars. I don't quite feel the same way. Steve has a scar on his upper arm from climbing through a trap door in an elevator and one on his thumb from filleting a red snapper. I love the image of him with his fish knife and the red snapper and the slice and the blood and holding a towel to his thumb on a ride to the hospital for stitches. I don't need to tell him about the shark bite because he was there, but I can tell him about the first time I tried to shave my legs and took off a huge strip of skin.
It's such an amazing thing that we carry our bodies around in this world with their beauty and their pain and their stories.
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