I was in an MRI machine.
It was scanning me for why
I felt pain in the kind of movement
you would need to marshal an airplane.
Or lift a mug to a high shelf.
A poem by Darcie Dennigan got me thinking
how apocatastasis might relate to
an inflammation of the infraspinatus.
I was hoping that the restoration of all things
would include my shoulder.
The doctor said, I’m not saying it’s all in your head, but—
In my head was the autumn issue,
its stones and windows, canines,
traces of god and breakage.
It’s the machine’s fault that I thought of poetry
as a way to scan for fractures.
When you lie in an MRI machine, a strong magnet makes
the hydrogen atoms in your body line up
in the same direction.
As I lay in the MRI machine, Stav Poleg’s poem
Meaning Something is like Going Towards Someone
exerted its own magnetic resonance
on the things in these poems that accompany
a movement in someone’s direction:
Paul Stephenson’s home-grown coriander,
Jessica Traynor’s oyster in a shoe,
Lisa Kelly’s ceramic fox made real
by an absence of the word ceramic.
I was given a collection of images.
Who knows what they meant?
And the pain moved slightly away.

Matthew McDonald