Sleet Seasonal Supplement — Summer 2011
First glimpse of the child sent to replace me
Is of glassine bone and milky skull.
Two hearts quicken, ages in ages yawn.
Doctors chat and diddle buttons,
Knead the image squirming on their monitors –
A handful of centimeters from ulna to shoulder,
The gauge of the brain-pan,
The auspicious twelfth rib.
There the heart, like a tulip sprouting from the chest,
The kiss-blowing machine, the plunge
Of its pumping, the determined sucking
Already underway.
The astronaut, wound round its cord,
The slack-eyed hero, the virtueless saint
Is selfing itself into light.
I gasp, from fear.
Little glue-boy, little glue-girl,
What will you come to?
No peace, no peace.
Your home all storm, a tempest of blood,
And in all that ocean one swimmer is stroking,
Stroking and stroking.
Clints be the islands that float apart.
Grykes be the fathoms that must be paved.
Schist be the rock that guards your heart.
Karst be the stones that cap your grave.
* Geological terms. On Ireland's Burren, a cap of limestone pushed up from the Atlantic, called the karst. The karst is sometimes broken into two looks – the stone outcroppings and the spaces separating them. The overall effect is extreme inhospitality.
Mike Finley's collected works volume, Yukon Gold: Poemes de terre, was published in August, and is available for free download at http://mfinley.com/pdf/poemes.pdf. Mike lives and writes in St. Paul.