He’s rather soulful, someone said
Half-undressed, your hands crossed on your chest,

you might be lying in state

but you are now the calmest of short deaths

in a room that’s calming,

rectilinear, worn smooth by New Age silence.

Even the acupuncturist who

looks like a well-tanned ballet dancer but cannot

move a word without a minute

passing, then a stutter on each syllable, is

therefore, mostly silent.
You’re nearly naked, stripped down to knickers

and T-shirt. He watches you

then actually says,Yes, and slowly his fingers

move your T-shirt down

discrete as sewing, for the needle he must touch

between your breasts,

and one lift of your knickers for another needle

just above your mons.

They are a stranger’s fingers, and they touch

like slow attentions.

More, perhaps, because his face is long, voluptuary

from troubled speaking

and you never know the body’s own seductions

surrendering, or wary,

(one more in both your wrists, then ankles) each

time he touches you and

says you must relax, and not wanting this ambiguous

more than soulful.
Silence. The sunlight moves across your face.

I listen to your breath

and try to feel you lying in this portrait.The needles

shine on your body

like the stars shiver on the limbs of constellations.

The body, and the silent

expanding universe … Years seem to be passing

in this room of elementary

pin-ups: the diagrams of Chinese men like pink

blow-up dolls.

The lines as virtual as an introvert’s tattoos.

Your nerves perform

the finest calisthenics and the tiny needles seem

the inverse of idea …
But who knows? Perhaps, above, below, you are

all the hexagrams

rising and falling, the whole I Ching may be

passing through you

like currents in a lake, the surfaces which hint

at all the abstracts

but are mirrors: the trees, birds, the universe of clouds,

a fisherman at sundown

like old souls … as this man watches you, and me, his face

handsome as a magazine

but so serious, so … (Is the soul our favourite pastiche?)
I think of an old man

lying prone in another room, in another context

altogether—as each image

jabs him, remembering so much of a world that’s gone

he can’t remember us

but calls out to the figures filling into him, says

the order of the years

all wrong, the slowest acupuncture undoing him, his soul

under moonlight, in the sun. . .

We might be in another room, when I am old, and these

nerves from my father

blinking off in me, and as the nurse reaches down

to me like needles

you waiting there, as I am now, in the corner

watching silently.
Later, you tell me how you felt without your usual

points of reference,

wanting to make the process work, knowing you had

opened up your past,

some grief, he said, and hoping he was touching you like

just another patient

even as he struggled for his words, and even as his watching

was lingering too long,

I thought of my father, so late and very close to dying

and the no-nonsense

nurse shouting: G’day Mr Salom! Now toss back

ya medicine! Whey!

And my mother flinching. And all the diagrams undone.