100 Million Billion Stars Found Hiding in the Milky Way; The Organ Donor Discusses Options with Her Body; You Say Poetry Is Weather for the Mind, Not an Umbrella

• by
• W. J. Herbert

100 Million Billion Stars Found Hiding in the Milky Way

The way fog hides the unknowns
of Stonehenge
 
or a cavern stashes bats
 
as wind
rips primrose from its roots?
 
Can the same forces
that cause a wall of galactic dust
to seem insurmountable,
 
the fabric of the Universe bunching up against it,
 
explain why a visible child might send up
a wall of docile words,
 
a vapor meant to save her
as she pretends that her father’s intimate
whispers
 
are meant for someone else,
and that she loves him
 
though she doesn’t?—
 
Or why the syllables
she mortars herself into will never grow
high enough to hide her,
 
and the wall is heavy, and it hurts?
 
If no amount of conjured dust and clouds
will ever keep him from finding her,
 
would that explain
how she knows that some scientists will never stop
trying
 
to pin down everything out there?
 
 
 

Organ Donor Discusses Options with Her Body

 
I know I should, but I haven’t
signed you up
 
It’s so hard to think of you
deconstructed,
 
separated from my
self, beloved

shell, empty of contents
numbered for transport:
 
corneas, kidneys, liver,
lungs. But not you, heart,
 
your injury’s too specific
& too grave
 
& not you either, brain,
 
though if a newborn
needed us,
 
wouldn’t we let
someone cut us
 
from the corpse
we’re becoming,
 
so that we could trigger
the charge that fires
 
her heart?—
help her to feel
 
along her vast
and perfect neural
 
pathways, all
our electric awe.
 
 
 

You Say Poetry Is Weather for the Mind, Not an Umbrella

I say an umbrella is not
a curve in the mind’s ribbed construct,
 
but a spoked and broken
barrel to shepherd us over the falls.
 
I say the falls are not the lake’s lachrymose
meanderings, but snowmelt
 
that the winged god of the wind
made vicious
 
and that, though his viciousness
fills our reservoirs,
 
his snow melt’s still a glacier
lost to trapped gases.
 
I say trapped gases
will not be the ultimate end of us,
 
but the means by which we are exposed
as cowards
 
and, though our cowardice is not
the sole weather of our temperament,
 
it’s the ribbed and scissible construct
we hide our ugliness under
 
and, so, poetry is not weather
for the mind: it’s our desperate umbrella.