A Poem: Extremity

I know you like the blind imperial healers of old.
My fingertips trace the braille of your pulse
Swell of crests,
Emptiness of troughs,
Freeing sonnets from their texture,
Ripples from a skipping stone.

But I dare not touch
your mysterious heart,
never have I palpated
your palpitations [<--- YURGH!]

Ancient Chinese believed
fingers and toes
tied a woman to her universe.
Good and evil gained access through them
struggled across clefts in joints
made war on battlefield limbs
until they bore witness to
the Empress, the Heart,
in Her forbidden city.

But that was a far more romantic age.

You're modern,
you don't even believe in
Qi and Xue.
To you, fingers and toes
aren't dooreways
but hinges and pivots of blood,
the violence of the hairpin turn
frozen in the whirls of the prints.

For you, a man never
truly touches anything but himself.
He is his own Middle Kingdom,
hollowed of an Emperor.

It requires more
than a few cubits to reach you.
Would the ends of the earth be enough?
Could I touch your heart from a distance
like the far moon moves the tides?

Or will I always be
Shivering barbarian clinging
frozen and futile steppes
before the Great Wall,
having long lost
all sense of feeling
in extremities?
---
I wrote this poem after re-reading John Pirog's book on Meridian Style Acupuncture. Jing-Well points are acupuncture points located on the most distal parts of the body, specifically the fingers and toes (and sole of the foot). What's interesting about them is that the interpretation of their significance apparently changed with changing historical contexts. In the "beginning" (whenever that was), the Jing-Well points linked a person with the universe; in other words, it was through these "doorways" that a person was able to draw energetic sustenance from the world, and also through them that pathogenic factors invaded. Later, however, the Jing-Well points became less doorways, and more "turn-arounds," where the flow of energy in the body would sharply reverse course. The first interpretation of Jing-Well points, Pirog believes, was due to the fact that, originally, the Chinese felt more at the mercy of the unpredictable forces of nature (notably the flooding of the rivers). Later, after various technological developments, and specifically, the irrigation systems, man felt himself a master over nature, and therefore, a "self-contained" and autonomous being. Therefore, in reflection, the Jing-Well points no longer needed to communicate with the external universe, and were instead viewed as "hairpin turns" that rebounded the current of energy back in towards the heartland, back in towards the self.