No. 7

Fall 2004

What if there was an accessible heart. Say
there is. Say you don't have to blacken
every scene with your brush, denounce
every visible joy. Say there's a way,
at the end, to still have something, un-
broken, to show for it. Say the means
are feasible, the price hardly too much.

The trees are made up of one big thing
comprised of many smaller things--
units--some you can pluck from the window,
others you'll likely never see.
When you pour steel over your chest--
a pink wound, a plate--there are no
smaller things. Just lumps, registered. The eye
notes a green and brown one, a red;
blue patches in between.

What if there was no end
to opening, like the dancer who leans
back, arm raised like a parenthesis
in the air, the curve of spine,
of chest, becoming more
like a circle. The way the petals of a rose extend
to flatness, the flower barely recognizable. An old
yellow mess in the center--gaudy even, and exposed.

Six million mouths, sometimes,
on any one leaf. Under a microscope, a section dyed
blue. Cells of epidermis separated like chicken wire,
stomata interrupting at random.
Just past my screen, the oak branch
and jagged finish of the leaf white-splotched
in the sun. Green-making, they were,
while I hunkered three days,
thinking that what I saw was everything,
thinking I'd managed to close each and every door.

Copyright 2004, Tara Moyle

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.