Six Revisions

The doctor holds my chest against the discus, listens like the fish below the ice listens to the fisherman. “Medicine,” he says, “is not an exact science.”

He listens like the ice fisherman listens to the fish. I breathe into a nebulizer and think about translation—inexact art. A fine, particulate mist.

Snow has fallen on
still-green grass,
daubed with yellow leaves.

___

Three takes on a line from St. Augustine’s Confessions. An acquaintance posted one online to the delight of followers, of us, and in delight, I went to the source, the lexicon: three alike, online translators, some fishy, copied, pasted, fished out of the public sphere. And each rings like a different key.

Snow has fallen
on [yellow] grass, daubed with
[still-green] leaves.

___

Poor old pear-thief Augustine, half-biographer:

1. “Where should my heart flee to in escaping from my heart?”
2. “Where could my heart flee to in escaping from my heart.” [sic]
3. “For where could my heart flee from my heart?”

[Grass] has fallen
on [still-white snow] daubed
with [yellow] leaves.

___

In the first translation is a hammering. “Should”—a moral judgment. An oiled object laid bare on a linen bed. “Shouldn’t” tied around the “should” with butcher’s string.

In the second, a yip, a certainty, desperate in its forwardness. “Where could?” as if the possible eluded him. To boot, denied its final mark. The thought falling from “Where could?” like rain from a cloud, a vanishing source.

Grass has fallen
on [yellow] snow daubed
with [snow-white] leaves.

___

“This will cut the cough off? from the brain,” the doctor says, offers me a tiny cup of codeine-orange syrup. The ache escapes like orange silk out of my orange lung. I slide into a mirror of my feelings, my face enlarged, expanding like a sponge. I grab at it.

The doctor says, “I lost it in the war.” He is talking about his thumb.

[Yellow leaves have] fallen
on [white] snow daubed
with [still-green grass].

_____

In the third Augustine translation is a thrum: “For / where / could / my / heart / flee / from / my / heart?” The thrum escaped the darkness of the drum. No “to” this time. The “to” escaped the darkness of the “from.”

Yellow leaves have fallen
on [green grass] daubed
with still-[white snow].