The first poems in After the Operation arrived unnoticed. Literally unnoticed.
In October of 2020, during New York City’s deep COVID lockdown, I met on Zoom with the Chief of Neurosurgery at NYU/Langone to discuss my most recent brain scan. The benign meningioma tumor we had discovered by accident in 2014 was, in fact, growing. Slowly, but surely. While I had no discernible symptoms, he recommended that in the next four to six years I should consider having it removed.
Having watched three close friends and one family member die of brain cancers, I was eager to stop the “watchful waiting” and suggested maybe the next day would be a good time to have it out? We agreed that January, 2021, would be appropriate, as by then hospital staff would have received two doses of the mRNA vaccines. Faced with two and a half months of waiting, I decided to start a small journal, separate from my usual writing journals and notebooks, to serve as an intimate interlocutor in the days ahead. Into it went worries, conversations with family, information from consulting neurologists, notes about my reading, details of the ups and downs in the silent shut-down city.
In early January, just before the surgery, I flipped back through the pages of this small notebook and came across an entry that I didn’t remember writing:
“After the operation her mind became an uninhabited coast. When we found her she offered us bone fragment and sea-weathered wood, asking what they meant. What looked like someone with her was a tall stone that leaned in, as if suddenly understood. ‘It was all shatter and throughfare,’ she said, and pointed to the wind.”
What was this? Where did it come from? How did it get there? Had it not been in my notebook, in my handwriting, between two journal entries that I did recall writing, I would have tried to dismiss it somehow. But there it was. It would not be trifled with, so I put aside the various poetry experiments and series on which I’d been working and stepped into its weird lyric space-time of After the operation…
For the next fourteen months, that prompt and portal was where I began to write in the early morning. All kinds of paths led away from that phrase: after the operation there would be, there might be, there was, she was, we were, she thought, we would think, the doctors said… The phrase proved a generative and astonishing source of poem drafts. A selection of beginnings from my writing notebooks:
After the operation…
…we didn’t know what to say…
…she could remember things that hadn’t happened…
…certain people became invisible…
…as sequence became constellation…
…what had been thrown away/discarded/overlooked…
…the idea of unbroken transmission…
…out of the lull of desolation an owl…
…a yellow scroll where the tumor had been…
…the discharge instructions became unstable…
…what had been dim became…
…the cat was still alive and dead…
…the tumor, as a person of interest…
…the tumor, like a hunted unicorn, put its head in her lap…
Some of the material made it into draft poems, which I placed carefully into a box with a tight lid. The drafts petered out as the 12-month follow-up scans showed no sign of residual or recurring tumor. A year later I felt strong enough to open the box, and was overwhelmed by the material: all of the terror, isolation, and bafflement I had chosen to ignore lay in wait, quietly, among the pages.
My standard response to fear is to learn everything I can about its source. This explains my historical obsession with vampires, terrorism, volcanoes, nuclear war, Wrathful Deities, magical words and objects designed to repel demons.
The medical literature was both precise and arcane, reassuring in its tone and baffling in its lexicon. The language and lacunae were fascinating. For example, neurosurgery distinguishes between lobes and fissures that are eloquent and those that are silent. The role of the former has been identified, the latter remains a mystery. Who knew?
I downloaded and worked through my own medical records in detail and began to scour the clinical literature for information on the tumor and my surgery (a “frameless stereotactic craniotomy with tumor resection”). The medical records seemed a liminal space, precisely recording me at a moment in time, in the third person, and from an inaccessible distance. The surgeon’s dictated description of the surgery was an excruciating document. It was an artifact blending adamantine precision and horrifying subject matter: a dispassionate and technical account of slicing into my scalp, removing a section of skull, and cutting through layers of meninges to find and resect the tumor.
Struggling for a handhold on the document I sensed archaeological analogies and went hunting for Howard Carter’s notebooks describing his discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in Egypt in the 1930s. Fusing the two accounts gave my experience a frame and an anchor. The task of assembling and framing the rest of the drafts required similar attention, exploration, and experimentation.
Parentheses, font variations, and quotation marks allowed separation between the voices of the patient, the doctors, and the chorus of friends and family members surrounding me. These tools, and the medical segments, buffered poetic material that felt radioactive. While the poems clearly arose from haunted fissures in post-op space-time, they are—at least for the moment—carefully contained in a book, and I can safely move on to whatever is next.
