stitching the headache (draft — capturing the intent)

if someone should ask me now
why i am so quiet i would tell them
that i am stitching the headache — doing what
my grandmother taught me to do:

to see the blue
amorphous pain in my head, to imagine myself drawing
a silver needle and silver thread around and through its edges,
pulling them tight so i could describe exactly where the pain was,
how large it was — and then to slowly stitch it down, smaller, smaller,
until at last it disappeared, and the headache always did too. and it does.

tonight i’m stitching down a headache
and wondering how well the technique might work with other things:
bad history, unwelcome accumulations, the way i get scared when one thing
leads to another and a cold becomes a rupture becomes a surgery
becomes another reason to remember my age. i mean,

my grandmother
hated my father. i wonder if she ever
stitched him down? did she see him
diminished — the bad indian
who stole her little girl? did she
tie him into a bag and drop him
into some hole in her own mind?

soon enough
i close my eyes and must pull the needle and thread out again,
look for the edges of the new pain, begin to sew. my grandmother, my mother,
my father, my wife, my aging body: i can’t fit everything in there.
i will capture what i can.