niwrad

Finally, it surfaced with a crunch,
lunch that had been damned by its cubicle,
its vehicle, its ventricles beating so
beating so beating so richly the blood
and oxygen mingled the red and blue.
Next came the IV, mangled, crumpled, wrapped
around hands, cupped in the most docile of fingers,
an American medical prayer. After that the psalm,
a slow and steady heartbeat, an EKG, scrawled on charts,
white linens, and a steady refusal to do anything
but make dashes in boxes and mark the time.
This is what he said first: mark the time
in all of its crunched ventricled mingilation,
its glory, its refusal to yield a constant reminder
of our march from grave to cradle and back
into the sea.