Early that season a wild limb knocked his jaw crooked, and he never quite got the left side hooked back properly on its hinge again.

—Denis Johnson, Train Dreams

That the body remembers
what we’d prefer to forget,
the blows and stark changes
delivered without warning.
The wild limb, flawlessly timed,
the missed step some salty
god’s devising, the fall
and everything after
precipitating a new rain
cloud you’ll never outrun,
always pinned to the one
shoulder, the one that aches
when it’s damp, which now
it’s never not. And the mind
that intricately replays
what used to be until it fades
like a dying chord in the trees,
a truth trusted to have been
as you’d like to recall it, the body
solid and bright as a new penny,
in perpetual exchange, no split
or rupture registered, no way
of imagining anything
as large and small
as the past tense.