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Michael Todd Steffen is the recipient of a Rotary International Fellowship, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship, and an Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award. His writing has appeared in journals including The Boston Globe, Taos Journal, E-Verse Radio, The Lyric, The Dark Horse, and North of Oxford. Of his second book of poems, On Earth As It Is, available from Cervena Barva Press, Joan Houlihan has noted the poet’s intimate portraits, sense of history, surprising wit and the play of dark and light … the striking combination of the everyday and the transcendent.

Doctor’s Hand

Michael Todd Steffen

Wary of anything prescribed—
not every line of writing is legible.
You don’t have the beam to scan its code,
fragment of choppy sea, scrawl of a graph
that would appall the English teacher
admonishing us to keep the toes of our letters
on the blue line, dot our i’s
and mind our p’s. The script for all
I can make out is for rat poison—
confirmed by the pharmacist’s shrug and easy
grasp of the formula’s terms.
Powdered into the capsule
I orbit in, it is to right
the chemical imbalance in my brain
whose acronymic syndrome I keep muddling—
puzzling… forgetting—aptly symptomatic
after all. You’re only human. We’re here
to make you better. So down the hatch,
patient awaiting grace of shadow falling
between the signifier and the signified.
You were a bird,
you were a vine.
String with two cups to the complicated
wired line that ran
into the box with innards
of induction coils,
an impedance transformer or something
that digested the dial
to drring drring drring…
Most always, at least as I was
growing up, you were purposed
with a conversant on the other end.
Now you are some netted
sea creature, were I to slice open
I could not begin to explain,
fuller of the facts
than Grace Hopper, even if
you insist on spelling triolet triplet.
Even if you are more apt now for a look up
than an evening-long friendly drone.

— Michael Todd Steffen

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