Still in the body

Since most of my time is tied up with activities surrounding my broken foot, here goes another exploration or two of the inside of the body.

I gained some new information about x-rays during my most recent set–what you see isn’t exactly what you’ve got. Although I did have good bone growth, my doctor said we weren’t really seeing my bone growth of THAT day. We were looking at what my fifth metatarsal looked like two weeks prior to the x-rays I had just had in the office that day.

Lately, many things are news to me and this was certainly one. The bone growth basically happens in two stages. Calcification is the second stage of the growth and the x-ray does pick the result of that process. The first stage of growth can’t be captured in x-ray–it can’t be SEEN yet.

I couldn’t help but feel the analogy to writing poems, to the difference between the first flush of the feeling or idea or perception and then what gets written–the language filling in the picture. And the time lag until such growth can be visible.

I don’t know whether it is scary or comforting to so often see the correspondence between life and art. But, then, on any given day I can feel as if I just crawled up out of a murky pond, or I can feel
In myself the fledging’s first successful attempts to land on a phone line.