The Chalk Pig
… and the child draws another inscrutable house.
Elizabeth Bishop, “Sestina”
I did not know then Nothingness.
Snow was white and cold and I ate it.
Under the white sheet
in the operating theater, I looked up at
a galaxy of stars while a man covered
my face with a mask and slowly
dropped ether on it till my eyes closed.
Underneath, I watched a cartoon:
A star came and stopped on top of a house,
then a pig dressed in a nightshirt and cap came out
the door and carried his house from under the star.
Again, the star floated over the pointed roof.
Again, the pig carried it away. Again and again.
The house, pig, and star were as a child would chalk
them on a slate. Where I was, was pitch dark.
I was alone in it,
with a sound like a chirp
or what a broken windowpane might make
as its pieces fell slowly to the floor.
Or say, rather, if a star could sing —
if it could play a piccolo …
Now, seventy years later when I shut my eyes,
the pig is still moving his house in the night,
a house not even night can erase,
and I cannot say what the sound is like.
When I sink down beneath consciousness,
beneath sleep, beneath the pixels and digits
of unassembled life into pulselessness,
will I become a chalked man shifting his
inscrutable house beneath a baleful star?