The Poet’s Angiogram

The poet’s angiogram would reveal me with its fluoroscopic dyes as a branching bloodcloud dilated in space around a pumping organ. Ready to fall into the sky at any moment through a tear in the pavement of reality. Though a tear in the skin of the model on the magazine cover. (The “tear” at the corner of her eye is based on inadmissible wordplay, a thoughtless homonym.) A roving purple mist of anxiety and longing.

(Language should wallpaper our world, not harbor bedbugs of infinity under its curling edges.)

Expelled from my mother's womb into the shark tank of reality, I am already "blood in the water."

O air whose waters I purple
Luminous clear ink dream dark with gravity’s
Invisible shark.

As when, on a first date, you plump yourself down on a corner of your apartment balcony to smoke a cigarette, showing off the expensive view to your new playmate, and the railing gives way sending you plummeting seventeen stories to your death on the street below, hitting a construction scaffolding on the way down. (Oops, I fell out of my life. I tripped on the sky.) Successive freeze-thaw cycles over the course of seasons have turned the concrete to oatmeal around the rusting anchor bolts. What are the innocent zigzags in winter’s temperature graph but the teeth of the invisible shark? Gravity is not a “physical constant” but a creeping hesitation, a conspiracy of opportunities, a web or tissue of increments, of dark—albeit slow—designs as candid and transparent as air, hidden in broad daylight—or as the “clear ink” (have you ever seen the ocean at night?) gravity conceals itself with while creating its masterpiece, dipping its pen in the inexhaustible well of luminous, inexplicable last moments.