T.R. Hummer

Godscan

 

The sun is the size of a human foot.
—Heraclitus

 

God has no body now but mine.
—St. Teresa of Avila

 

 

 

1. The agon in medias res

 

The Prophet is strangling God again.
The two of them are lashed
Together in the gurney of an MRI machine—

 

Face to face, as the Prophet, trashed
On serotonin, cortisol, and silver-white
Gadolinium dye, sees it; while God, cast

 

Like a numinous shadow on the Prophet’s
Cranial cave-wall, faces blankness: seeing all
Means seeing nothing, certainly not

 

2. Concerning the material existence of God

 

A particular human countenance. So, while
The Prophet wraps human hands
Around God’s godly windpipe—the Prophet feels

 

It literally as a pipe, an unyielding span
Of steel—God feels nothing. Or,
Feeling everything everywhere always, God can

 

Perhaps lose track of such a small particular
As one human’s effort to snuff Them out.
God’s obliviousness is impossible to bear,

 

 

3. An inquiry into the necessity of God’s attention

 

And, even knowing the futility, the Prophet
Bears down harder on the holy indifferent
Trachea. So the unbreakable pattern set

 

In childhood goes on, an innocent
Sibling rivalry evolved
Into full-blown homicidal, prophetic hate,

 

The apotheosis of a Freudian drama unabsolved
By the grace of God, who seems to have
None to give. It’s not God’s withheld love—

 

It’s the indifference that drives
The Prophet’s murderous despair.
Meanwhile, the MRI begins to weave

 

 

4. In which the machine enters, canceling metaphysics

 

Alien hummings and poundings around the pair
Inserted in its gleaming orifice.
What are the doctors up to, and why are these two there,

 

Bit players from the Old Testament? The scientists
Are of at least two minds. The MRI might make
A living map of madness—or (and this

 

Is the minority view, left unspoken) take
A photograph of God. The doctors and technicians
Call the Prophet The Subject, and God (their joke)

 

 

5. Concerning the uncertainty of the scientific method

 

The Foreign Object. One contrarian
Among them thinks that diagnosis literally accurate.
An expert surgeon trained in neuromedicine,

 

This doctor has a theory, elaborately worked out.
It’s easy to say the Prophet’s mad. Can anyone name,
In the history of the world, one sane Prophet?

 

But what if the Subject has an Object on the brain:
A literal sibling never born, undeveloped but present
Like a mind-distorting tumor: a parasitic twin?

 

 

6. Concerning the duplicity of everything

 

It happens. In medicine, nothing is defined by precedent,
But more of us were multiple in utero
Than we realize, our alter egos viable, then not,

 

Sometimes reabsorbed, melted off like rotten snow,
(Vanishing twin) but sometimes surviving as a bio-
Artifact attached to the other still-developing embryo,

 

An undigested lump that easily might go
Unnoticed for a lifetime—a sort of benign
Carcinoma on the ribcage or in the shadow

 

Of a fold of lung. Most often,
The developmentally challenged (we
Don’t say cannibalized or dead) twin

 

 

 

7. Do things too close to the eye appear infinite or merely enormous?

 

Is situated so it appears externally
As, perhaps, an extra leg or foot or bony sharkfin
Of vestigial pelvis, and must be removed surgically

 

From where it breaks the meniscus of the skin.
More rarely, the twin remains wholly within,
Invisible, fetus in fetu, only outwardly known

 

When, or if, it becomes a problem. Fewer than one
In one million pregnancies results in such a prodigy.
In the whole history of Western medicine,

 

The sum of known cases is tiny,
Fewer than two hundred. Much remains dim,
Our neurologist knows, particularly

 

 

8. The mind-body problem

 

With any sibling lodged above the brainstem.
Well, a psychoanalyst might joke, aren’t they all?
Craniopagus parasiticus affixes to the cranium’s

 

Exterior. But has there ever been an intracranial
Manifestation? What if your sister or brother,
Compressed to the size of a coffin nail,

 

Were pounded into your amygdala with a framing hammer?
There could be complications—some physical,
That would require a surgeon to repair—

 

But what would happen to the Subject’s mental
Horizon? reads one case report.
What would be the effect on the whole scale

 

 

9. Concerning the world as idea, or vice versa

 

Of the Subject’s psyche? Woefully short
Of data, the doctors practice on,
Fumbling for God inside a brain, their art

 

Unsuited to such a weird phenomenon.
Meanwhile, the Subject, monomaniacal,
Pounds on the Object’s immaculate face, at one

 

With his fists and an inborn rage, a furious black hole
At the center of what, in another century,
An exorcist would have called the soul.

 

 

10. Is rage against God a dysfunction?

 

The examination room quiets as the MRI
Winds down.  Huddled around the screen
Where—who knows?—the Deity

 

Might manifest, the doctors and technicians
Wager silently: what will they see? Tumor
Or artifact? Burning bush or lesion?

 

Meanwhile, a nurse helps the Prophet to a wheelchair,
And helps God too, if in fact there is a God within
That holy wreck of a human, who doesn’t care

 

 

11. The storehouses of the snow

 

That God is a circle whose center can only be seen
Within the circumference of one skull, which the machine
And only the machine discovers. Revelation

 

By magnetic pulse shimmers on a computer screen
While the doctors, struck dumb, commune
In silence. The wheel of the instrument spins.

 

Its needle points to the necessary sacred medicine.
They who are whole have no need of a physician—
But God if has turned Their face away, who can be whole again?