The Poem I Recited in the MRI Machine
Forty claustrophobic minutes, and my memory held the only open window.
The technician's name was Denise, and she told me the machine would sound like someone jackhammering the inside of a submarine, and she was underselling it.
I had known about the scan for eleven days. Eleven days is a very specific length of time: long enough to read every horror story the internet keeps in stock, short enough that you can't talk yourself into being a different kind of person before the appointment. I am claustrophobic in the way that doesn't show up at parties. Elevators are fine. Airplane seats are fine. What undoes me is the idea of lying still while something holds me, the not-allowed-to-move of it. When the referral letter said forty minutes, head coil, contrast dye, I read it in the parking lot of my doctor's office and laughed out loud, once, like a bark.
The scan itself was routine, they kept saying. A precaution. Persistent headaches, probably nothing... let's just look. Everyone was very calm about the possibility of something being wrong with my brain except me, the person whose brain it was.
Here is what I did with my eleven days. I did not meditate, although I downloaded three apps and opened none of them. I did not call the imaging center to ask about the open-sided machines, because that felt like admitting something. What I did, on night four, at 2 a.m., in the blue light of my phone, was stumble onto a thread where a stranger wrote that she had survived her scans by reciting poems in her head, and that the trick was you had to memorize them cold beforehand, because, she wrote, "you can't bring anything into the tube except what's already in you."
You can't bring anything into the tube except what's already in you. I lay there and took inventory. Song lyrics, half of them. The opening of a novel I'd started memorizing in college to impress a girl, abandoned at sentence three. My own phone number. It was a thin suitcase for a forty-minute trip.
So I did the only strictly practical thing I have ever done with poetry.
I trained.
I picked a poem I had loved at nineteen and never finished learning, one about a lake and a small cabin and beans, you likely know the one, and I memorized it the way you'd memorize a fire escape route. On the bus. In the shower, wet index cards, ink running. Chopping onions, whispering lines at the cutting board until my wife leaned in the doorway and asked, gently, if I was casting a spell. "Yes," I said, and kept chopping. She didn't push. On the drive to the imaging center she quizzed me on the second stanza like it was a spelling test, both of us pretending this was normal, and her hand stayed on my knee at every red light.
Denise gave me earplugs and foam pads for my head and a rubber bulb to squeeze if I panicked. "Most people do great," she said, and slid me in.
The tube is closer than you think it will be. That's the honest report. The ceiling of it sat maybe four inches from my nose, smooth and off-white, lit from somewhere I couldn't find, and my whole body understood before my mind did that we could not sit up, and sent up the first flare of animal panic, the kind with no vocabulary in it.
And then the machine started its jackhammering, and I went to the lake.
I will arise and go now. I said it in my head... and the lines came, and I want to tell you exactly what that felt like, because it surprised me. It did not feel like distraction. Distraction is thin; I've tried distraction, it's a curtain, and panic walks straight through curtains. This was more like architecture. Each line I laid down was a floorboard, and as long as I kept laying them, there was somewhere to stand. Nine bean rows. The hive for the honeybee. The machine hammered in one world and the linnet's wings moved in the other, and I lay exactly on the border with a foam pad against each ear.
I finished the poem in under two minutes.
Forty minutes is a lot of two minutes.
So I did it again, slower. Then again, giving each line a full breath, in through the nose on the first half, out on the second, which I had not planned but which my body invented on the spot, an accidental meter. Somewhere in the fourth recitation the panic stopped pacing. It didn't leave... I want to be truthful. It sat down at the edge of the lake like a dog that has decided, provisionally, not to bite anyone, and it watched the water with me.
Fear had locked every door in the building, and the poem was the one window it did not know I had.
Between sequences, Denise's voice came through the little speaker: "Doing okay in there?" And I said something I'm still proud of, which was, "I'm at a lake." There was a pause, the sound of a technician deciding whether her patient had lost it, and then... "Whatever works, hon. Four minutes on this next one."
By the last stretch I had run out of Yeats and moved to the suitcase's other contents, the half-remembered lyrics, my grandmother's recipe for dal recited like scripture, and finally, with nothing left, some ragged lines I made up right there in the tube, about the tube, about how a machine that sees inside your skull still cannot see the lake. They were bad lines. I said them anyway. When the table hummed and slid me out into the ordinary light, I felt the way you feel stepping off a boat, the ground too solid, my wife's face doing that thing where relief arrives before the smile does.
The results, since you're wondering, came back clean. "Unremarkable," the report said, which is the only context in which that word is a trophy.
But the strange part is what happened afterward. The headaches faded, the appointment scrolled off the calendar, and the poem stayed.
It had moved in.
I caught myself saying it while stuck in traffic, in a dentist's chair, in a hallway outside a meeting I was dreading. I had installed a room in my head during an emergency and it turned out the room worked on ordinary days too. I got greedy about it. I memorized another, and another, building the suitcase I wished I'd had, poems about memory and about hope, one about a father's cracked hands on a Sunday morning that I cannot get through without my throat closing, which is exactly why it's in there. And the ragged lines I made up in the machine did not stay ragged. I worked on them for a month, actually studied a little, took a course on line breaks like a person who meant it, and when the poem about the tube and the lake was as good as I could make it, I sent it to a monthly poetry contest, because a thing that held the door for me deserved to be seen in daylight.
People say poetry is impractical, and for most of my life I nodded along. Then medicine put me in a plastic throat four inches deep and said hold still, and every practical thing I owned was in a locker down the hall. My phone. My keys. My wife... All of it outside.
You can't bring anything into the tube except what's already in you.
Load the suitcase now. That's the whole advice. Pack it before you need it, and pack it with lakes.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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