A Collection of Thorns

Abstract

A Collection of Thorns D. Allen (bio) bodig (Old English) originally described the “trunk or chest” of a man or animal, but came to mean “person” in the late 13th century. Physical form cleaved, by language, from the soul. When I was nineteen I still believed my body could stand for anything, could withstand anything. One gray afternoon at the Duke Gardens I wandered with a couple of artist friends among bamboo groves and bloomless rose hedges looking for thorns. A barberry bush stooped low at the top of the sandy path gave us what we came for: woody spikes, each with three spines radiating from one base like the spokes of an unfinished wheel. We snapped twenty-six from the stem, slipped them into a shoebox. You rub my back during a pain flare and I remind you to avoid the spine. Many times you remember on your own, now. I say the spine because it is easier than saying my body feels broken and your touch makes it real. I have trouble describing how it feels when I become unable, for a stretch of days or weeks, to hold myself upright. I start to tell you about the time when the biggest hurricane of my childhood lured dune after dune into the raging Atlantic; I begin to demonstrate the act of pulling the string from a strand of beads so quickly they scatter. But the image that haunts me still is the specter of a tower looming on my mind’s horizon. The power plant’s elder smokestack presided over the walking path I once traced to work—two city blocks down, one over, one down, one over—and it became, as landmarks do, familiar. A pebble in my palm turned over and over. Snow melted in rivulets down the sidewalks and the pink magnolias were about to make good on their annual promise when a four-man crew arrived at the tower. Harnesses, hard hats, jackhammers, dumpster. They climbed to the top and, like brutal dentists gathered over the mouth of a lamprey, began pulling out every one of its teeth. [End Page 127] bæc (Old English) comes from Proto-Germanic *bakam, which allowed for a distinction between an animal’s back or the ridge of a mountain range, and a human’s upright body. We brought our collected treasures home. In an empty attic room warmed by space heaters, I took off my shirt. I was shy but I needed to know that words were more than sounds, that they could change and be changed by the body. She took each thorn and, using the wax of a white candle, pressed it to a vertebra until it stayed. He held the camera, the light. With a line of thorns down my spine I became. The pain begins with a twinge near the thoracic spine. Exacerbated by: sitting, standing, lying down, carrying a bag on the back, carrying a bag on the shoulder, leaning over, stretching, reaching, walking, lifting anything. Caused by nothing at all. When the twinge becomes a gasping, I call the doctor. I get into the position my college dance teacher called constructive rest and wait for muscle relaxers to work. I no longer live in the same city, but when I close my eyes the tower appears as an afterimage, bright column on a dark field. Demolition was finished by week’s end. I had looked at the tower from across the street almost daily. I had never seen it. On the final day, when its stature was so diminished that the men stopped wearing harnesses—reduced to a cross-section of itself as the rubble pile grew—the tower spoke over jackhammer whine. Tk - tk. The doctor knocks, walks into the exam room with a sheaf of x-rays, all clean. They always are. Subluxations of the vertebrae and ribs are quieter than fractures and more difficult to trace. He asks me to stand straight, to bend forward, to touch my toes. Nothing to see here. It is never the bending that hurts. Pain arrives when I try to return to a way of being that has, in the stretch, become...