Shadow's Acoustic
Blood doesn’t go backward but it must,
once it's pumped, though only in the slack,
echo in the constricting chambers
somewhere, and only in sound. I wonder
if this kind of hearing is like feeling a belfry
wall after the monumental bells are gone still
and their ropes hung back and limp, how if my hand
is perceptive enough and carnal
my palms on the inside of the lissom turret
stones, they’d read the vibrations sent into
the veins and set there like a scar, ages ago,
a deep agreement sealed in the lung of it when
say, a pneumonia’s diagnosis could go
either way: remember that moment when God
gets nearly pinned to the desert
road by Jacob and the referee, (whom-
ever he is) sound in his sight, nearly gives
the match to the man and maybe
he blinks, there’s salt
in his eye and the upper hand
shifts and the loss becomes a draw?
And what’s this got to do with blood? Maybe
nothing except it’s my pulse that’s going back
and forth over the curves, beneath my skin.
I’m thinking if I touch the stones in the house
that hangs the bells, and when the bells
go still I’ll listen and close my eyes
and let the echo (like in any cave) fixed there
climb to my fingerbone and then my sternum
and then beneath it bleed through to those
oh, I don’t even know what they’re called,
in the dissected heart muscle I saw, the places
that resonate and pattern sound in there: hand
prints, reindeer, great extinct beasts without
ever any chance again at the light. All shadow now,
a raised sonography, like something
slicing back, a scalpel, maybe, sliding its simple whisper
through the flesh, right through the roof
of it, into the bells outer edges and then, drawing
back to only, the true purpose, forge ahead,
always ahead, appealing.
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