
Anthony Immergluck
Surgeries
When the surgeons land their spaceships
they will find you are a world.
Inchoate, volcanic, still
battered by asteroids,
then breathable, bubbling,
brushed by frontier.
And when the surgeons lay their chisels
in the divots of your skin,
they will find you are a geode
whose angles run wild and violet
in your desiccated hollows.
And when the surgeons drop their lines
they will find you are an ocean
of fringing reefs and woven stipes;
forgotten anchors snared in the holdfast.
They will discover the color dulls
the deeper they sink.
And were the surgeons just to knock
they would find you are a room
where the dogs are ostensibly
prohibited from the couch
and the upright piano
has a dead Middle F.
They would find you are a room
with a little bronze Buddha
with his belly distressed
and a clock that doesn’t work
but was your mother’s.
This poem was originally published in Issue 77 of The Sonora Review.