Autopsy
Virginia M. Heatter
American Literary Review
Spring 2006
This is the sky where it meets
the water's surface.
This is the wet ridge of it,
the line between life and drowning.
This is the glow of embers rising
against the rigors of evergreen.
This is a ring of large stones,
and in the nostrils, cedar burning.
This is the sound, still throbbing
in the ear canal, of translucence
passing through narrow tubes.
This is the salt of confluence,
and the sweet of imperfection.
This is melody, harmony, silence.
And this —
is the dead space, the rift
behind the gums, that hollow.
Sounds like a poet got trapped in a pathologist's body. The poet has gone into the morgue and made off with a corpse, lifted it part by part, organ by organ, into syllables belonging to the realm of poetic fantasy. You can hear the faint hints of phonetic borrowing from a medical textbook, inserted between the lines of verse. It says "embers" and you think "embolus, emboli", "rigors of evergreen," "large stones," "throbbing."
A little tenuous, perhaps? Or tedonitis? The cleft of severed scar. Umbilical, abdominal.
<< Home