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.