Cheryl Caesar
Manuela the tortoise found after thirty years alone in a junk room
After an article by Stephen Messenger on Treehugger, Feb. 4, 2013.
What does a tortoise think? What does she feel?
She lives long and moves slow, heavy and protected.
Thirty years may pass like a sluggish dream.
We may rail against her long incarceration,
like Ricky Jackson’s, deserving of reparations—
but wonder: as a pet, was she not always captive?
Or we may cheer her escape, like Billy Hayes
fleeing on the midnight express from his thirty-year sentence—
although it seems she never scratched the door.
Or pity her stolen life, like Jaycee Dugard’s.
But, as Dugard found out, little by little,
the life you live becomes the real one.
Around her termites flashed, emissaries of light.
They live only a year or two. They feed on the trees
whose prana we block and hide in darkened rooms.
But nature always finds her way in.
In thirty years of encephalitic lethargy, Miss R,
a patient of Oliver Sacks, thought of nothing.
“It’s dead easy, once you know how.”
Turning the corners of a cerebral quadrangle.
Silently repeating seven notes of a Verdi aria.
Drawing mental maps of maps of maps.
“My posture leads to itself,” she said. Perhaps Manuela too
curled endlessly inward, a shell in a shell. Perhaps
she too repeated for thirty years (in Tortoise):
“I am what I am what I am what I am…”
Author’s Note: For “Miss R,” cf. Oliver Sacks, Awakenings, Vintage, 1973, p. 76.
Poems by Cheryl Caesar have appeared in Writers Resist, The Mark Literary Review, Agony Opera, Cream and Crimson, Total Eclipse, Prachya, The Trinity Review, The Mojave River Review, Panoply and Winedrunk Sidewalk, among other venues. Caesar holds a doctorate in comparative literature from the Sorbonne. She lives in East Lansing and teaches writing at Michigan State University.
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