Marble-Sized Song

Does she love you? She says yes, but really

how do you know unless you undress that easy assertion,

undoing its petals and laminae, and going in

below all trace of consciousness, into the neuroelectrical

coffer where self-understanding is storaged away,

and then lifting its uttermost molecule out, to study

in its nakedness as it spins

in a clinical light?—the way

we all, in our various individual versions

of this common human urge, go in,

and in, and in, the physicist down

to the string-vibration underlying matter, and   

the Appalachia fiddler getting so

(as she puts it) “into my music,” sound becomes

a flesh for her to intimately (“in”-timately)

enter, “its thick and its sweetbreads.”

Is he cheating on you? He says no, and feigns

that he’s insulted, but for certainty

you’ll need to delicately strip the bark away

and drill, and tweeze, until you can smear a microscope slide

of the pith and can augur the chitterlings

—the way the philosopher can’t accept a surface

assumption of truth, but needs to peel back   

the fatty sheen of the dermis, soak the cambium layer

into a blow-away foam, and then with pick

and lightbeam helmet, inch by inch begin

spelunking through those splayed-out caverns

under the crust, where gems of cogitation are buried

—the way the diver descends for the pearl,

the miner: in, the archaeologist: in, the therapist: down

the snakier roots of us and in, and in, the way

the lone, leg-pretzeled yogi makes

a glowing bathysphere of worldliness and sends it in,

and further in, tinier and heavier and ever in,

the way the man in the opium den is floating forever,

toward a horizon positioned in the center of the center

of his head. . . . If we could stand beyond the border

of our species and consider us objectively, it might seem

that our purpose in existing is to be a living agency

that balances, or maybe even slows, the universe’s

irreversible expansion out, and out . . . and each

of us, a contribution to that task.

My friend John’s wife received the news: a “growth,”

a “mass,” on her pituitary, marble-sized, mysterious.

And the primary-care physician said: Yes,

we must go in and in. That couldn’t be the final word!

And the second-opinion physician said: Yes,

my sweet-and-shivering-one,

my fingerprint-and-irisprint-uniqueness,

someone’s-dearest, you

who said the prayers at Juliette’s grave, who drove

all night from Switzerland with your daughter, you

on this irreplaceable day in your irreplaceable skin

in the scumbled light as it crosses the bay in Corpus Christi,

yes in the shadows, yes in the radiance,

yes we must go in and in.