SESTINA FOR MY FATHER | Lynn Lawrence
No one lived in our living room
But it silently witnessed the secrets of lives lived.
My father loved photography and became a radiologist
who decoded the inside story of the body narrative.
Sundays, my job was to dry the x-rays
and place them against the living room walls.
Ribs were splayed against the walls
spectral skeletons animated the living room
chests riddled with a lifetime of smoking said x-rays,
lungs and their suspicious spots told how you lived,
calcifications remarkable and otherwise said the narrative,
the bowels were obstructed said my father the radiologist.
The woman who kept swallowing spoons was brought to the radiologist.
The saying “walls could talk” was true because the stories our walls
told proved the bruises of abuse, child and domestic narratives.
Broken bones sat atop the couch, hands atop the Steinway, the room
a living room scant of chatter, but bones that clattered, here lived
untold secrets lying in plain sight in 3D, hung from hangers like skirts : x-rays.
My huge rectangular yellow sponge made great strides over the x-rays
I held them up against the light refracted through the blinds like the radiologist
looked through his view-box. These were the Sunday mornings I lived.
They made Joseph Cornell shadow boxes against the walls.
What would a neighbor say if they walked into this room?
One did and an x-ray turned his shoulder pain to cancer narrative.
As the drying streaks disappeared to reveal the hidden narrative
I thought my father could see clear inside of me without an x-ray.
Wrists, craniums and esophagus, were small and fit against my body’s room
Entire gastrointestinal tracts made my arms ache I confessed to the radiologist.
Looking at the skull series near my brother’s Bar Mitzvah photo on the wall
It never occurred to me that this was a strange life we lived.
When the radiologist got sick I went into his hospital room
I told him stories of the amazing life he lived
He was one of a kind my dad the radiologist
I vowed someday I’d tell his narrative
In his sixty years of practice he must have taken a million x-rays
I saved his teaching slides, now they’re on my walls.
We lived in a house that had x-rays for paintings
The radiologist never ran out of medical narrative
The walls in my bedroom were lined with lead.
Lynn Lawrence is a psychotherapist in private practice in New York City. A graduate of Columbia’s Narrative Medicine Program, she is a co-editor of Narrative in Social Work Practice: The Power and Possibility of Story. Her chapter in that book, “Garden at Vaucresson: It’s Not all a Bed of Roses,” represents a lived experience of how the close reading of Vuillard’s painting in concert with reflective writing uncorks a family trauma. Her most recent article, “Mourning Becomes Elect[ronic]”, published in SYNAPSIS (2021) traces technology as an aid in mediating bereavement from Victorian mourning photography to the use of FaceTime during COVID. Her work has appeared in Intima (2011), The Psychoanalytic Review (2014) and Smith College Studies in Social Work (2016), among other journals.