I didn’t think I could get away with another day of saying “Well, I didn’t write the poem again” without taxing my readers’ patience or my own. And so today I was grateful I’d been keeping this journal, because it gave me a little bit of an extra push, helped me stay at my desk, wrestling the lines into focus. All this afternoon I worked and reworked, and though I felt as if the poem were just waiting there, right beneath the surface, waiting to be written, I was also surprised by where it moved, and a bit spun around by it—which is a good sign, that a poem takes its author aback, unsettles.
Showing you a poem at this stage in its development feels a bit like answering the door in my underwear: I don’t feel presentable or put-together. The poem may well have gaffes and repetitions, or weak lines. I’ll be fine-tuning it for a while to come, reading it aloud, listening for the weak spots.
But I can feel that it’s substantively here, its embrace achieved. Or so I think just now, anyway—I may look at it in horror tomorrow and decide a major overhaul’s in order! But today it feels right, and here it is.
ULTRASOUND
I’m ushering the dogs into the back of the car,
after our morning walk in the wet woods,
herding them in—Beau who needs his generous
attention brought into focus, his gaze
pointed into the tailgate so he’ll be ready
to leap up, and Arden, arthritic in his hind legs,
who needs me to lift first his forepaws
and then, placing my hands under his haunches,
hoist the bulk of him into the wagon,
so that he growls a little before he turns around
to face me gratefully, glad to have been lifted—
and as I go to praise them, as I like to do,
the words that come from my mouth,
out of nowhere, are Time’s children,
as though that were the dearest thing
a person could say, the most loving name.
Where did that come from, why did I
call them by that name? I know
they fly along that quick parabola
faster than we do, racing the arc
as though it were some run
they’d gone for, a jaunt in the best
of woods, so inviting they continue
in their dreams, paws twitching slightly,
sometimes even releasing little stifled cries,
—as though even asleep they must hurry ahead
in the motion of time, which doesn’t go fast enough
for them already? Weeks ago
my good boy—patient, willing to endure
whatever we deem necessary for him—
lay on his side on the high table,
while the vet ran along the shaved pink
and blonde down of his belly a kind of wand,
pointing a stream of soundwaves
to translate the dark inside his ribs
onto a midnight screen, its pulse
and throb of storm systems
charcoaled, imperial black, his body
figured as a field of pinpoints
subtle as the faintest stars.
The wand slides, the unseen’s made
—not clear, exactly, nothing like anatomy
as I’d expect it, no chartable harmony
of parts. Something more like a blackboard
covered with a dust of living chalk, feeding,
hurrying, a live chaos-cloud worried
by turbulence, as the rod glides ahead
and the doctor narrates these swoons
of shadow I can’t quite force into shape:
The kidneys might … the spleen appears …
But I can’t see what he sees, and so resort
to simile: cloudbank, galaxies. That’s it,
the inside of a dog’s body resembles the far sky,
telescopic space alive with slow comings
and goings, that far away.
The doctor makes appreciative noises,
to encourage me; he praises Beau’s stillness.
I stroke the slope of face beneath
his open, abstracted eyes. I’d like to see
where a bark begins its urgent unspooling
up from the depths beneath the surface of his belly
—revealed now, blue-veined, gleaming
with an alcohol gel to allow the sound waves
to penetrate more precisely. Though they don’t locate
the quick core of him, his alert responsiveness
to the world—rabbit, stranger, cat on the lawn—
how the impulse leaps out of nowhere
then swells as it unfurls beneath the spine,
past the lungs’ sounding chamber,
propelled by the diaphragm’s push
across voicebox, tongue and the bright garden
of teeth into the light, baritone whoop
saying back to the day anything at all.
You can’t see that, nor the clockworks deep
in the wellsprings, or that fixed place
out of which the dog’s long regarding
of us rises. We didn’t see, really,
anything. It wasn’t cancer, wasn’t clear,
no diagnosis firm. He’s having trouble
keeping up his weight, and he’s lost
his old appetites, though he races the damp trails
as though there were no tomorrow,
still fire, the same golden hurry
I’ve loved these years. Imagine a sound
to read us, render us, this morning,
in the last of the April rain,
the three of us energized by duration,
bound by the firing and fueling
in our depths, penetrated
by a rhythm too swift for us to hear,
though we catch intimations
of that furious rush and ardor.
Would it be an endearment,
the sound time makes,
seeing through us,
ushering us through?