Diagnosis
By the time I was six months old, she knew somethingwas wrong with me. I got looks on my face
she had not seen on any child
in the family, or the extended family,
or the neighborhood. My mother took me in
to the pediatrician with the kind hands,
a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:
Hub Long. My mom did not tell him
what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed.
It was just these strange looks on my face—
he held me, and conversed with me,
chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother
said, She’s doing it now! Look!
She’s doing it now! and the doctor said,
What your daughter has
is called a sense
of humor. Ohhh, she said, and took me
back to the house where that sense would be tested
and found to be incurable.
(Met this poet several times in Princeton at Labyrinth. She has stunning silvery hair and is an amusing person with whom to chat.)
That's actually kind of a funnyawful poem. The baby looks amused, and the mother thinks she's possessed? Surely the head spinning and the spewing of pea soup types of liquids would have been a better indication.
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Here's to the testing of that sense, humor. Though it fades and is obscured, it eventually rebounds. Here's hoping.