Every hospital keeps a code for the patient who dies twice—
not medically, but bureaucratically—the paperwork’s price
of a person who expires, is documented, and then is found
alive in the room, which is a problem for the surround.
My cousin died in the ICU on a bitter winter night—
cardiac, documented, the chart, the time, the right
procedure of pronouncement, the family called in full—
and four hours later she woke up, inexplicably full.
Full with something the living haven’t earned—
not the near-death-experience, not the sentimental lectra
of tunnels and of lights and of the dead loved ones in queue—
but technical information, specific and perplexed.
Technical information about the town she’d grown up in—
the soil composition of the soccer field’s discipline—
the underground structure of the county’s eastern land—
the attending and its compact with the family’s hand.
She knew things our grandmother had never told us—but they matched
the cedar chest’s journal perfectly, cross-hatched
across sixty years of documentation in the chest—
and she’d never seen the journal, never been the guest.
The doctors attributed it to oxygen deprivation’s tricks—
the brain under hypoxic stress produces interesting picks
of stored and confabulated material, they said—
but the technical data she provided wasn’t in her head.
Wasn’t in anything she could have accessed through any living means—
it was specific, verifiable, outside any scenes
she’d been part of in her life—and she described it as delivered—
delivered by something she’d encountered and shivered.
Encountered in the four hours between her first death and her second start—
something in the space between that had a lot of art—
that had chosen her specifically to carry the message back—
and that had returned with her, she said, riding on her track.
Riding on her back, she said—attached—and still attached—
still present in the room when she described it, latched—
she pointed at the corner of the ICU at something unseen—
and the equipment in the corner lost its voltage completely.