Poem: Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva

I was intending on posting this poem on Sunday per usual routine, but I kept playing with it and it turned into something different and unexpected. The bones of this poem began nearly three and a half years ago in a creative writing class; the file is still entitled "English 92: Ekphrastic Poem." We went down to the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford looking for inspiration; I wrote about some Rodin sculptures. Then, as a first year medical student, I learned about this extraordinarily rare disease (probably the subject of tomorrow's blog) and I tried hard to fit that disease into the pre-existing poem (and at that time, it was in blank verse). It didn't work. So this weekend, I decided to loosen the chains and see what came out. I realize the title and the first stanza will probably need to go.

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Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva

When I first wrote this, it was too locked in,
too myopic, too keen for details,
five wooden iambs, three horrid stanzas
as I imagined this poem must be,
trying to confront
the second most frightening
most perversely romantic
disease I've ever known.

This far out, who could say where the Gorgon was born,
writhing in clasps, a cave flung out to sea
the waves lapping at statues of rock, barren
and lonely, gulls in the distance.
Who could understand her plight;
she never asked for a lock of snakes
or a house of bones, she never asked
for a propensity for terror or
ophidian eyes; why,
she'd much rather let her hair down
without worrying about the hissing
and go out on the weekend.
You cover-judgers, she says, if only you'd--
and simply that silences her audience.

Take the Thinker, child of an august man
muscular, folded and brooding,
a marble-and-bronze sentinel
as if we would not take pause at the Gates of Hell.
What could force him into such a form?
Stunned as a new mother hearing the cry of her child
stunned as the backpacker at Iguazu falls
the toppling mists leaving rainbows in their wake.
Oh, the things one could contemplate in this world,
the passions and regrets that only spring to mind
when we can do nothing more,
villains and nemeses and lovers and loves
frozen in time, impotent.

Until I met Winter, who had a siren's voice
a music that rumbled in her chest
aching to escape an incarceration of bone.
Stricken by this disease of wayward romance
her muscle and fat ossify overnight
scaffolding bone on bone,
unpronounceable, unreasonable, unsolicited,
arresting her in this home she carries on her back.
Snail, turtle, armadillo, ankylosaurus,
if she spoke their language, she would ask
how they make their shells their armor
how they skirt that dreadful position,
elbows on tucked knees, Dante at his best.
If she spoke their language, she would ask
for a dance
a ballroom with three tiered chandeliers
chiming as a breath of air
billows curtains, billows ballgown
a step beyond this bony manacle
a spin past this bronze casting
a grin at the medusa that left her wallflower
for so much of the night because,
if we cannot have a last dance
what can we have, at all?