—Disappearance—Nativity

I was a garden and you
my gardener. I was a house,
you my lodger,

lodged beneath my heart.
My Heart, you were the fist that knocked
and knocked and I would not answer.

You starved me down
until a glance could pass straight through me
as I lay

on the obstetrician’s vinyl couch,
under a shroud
that stank of Clorox.

They mined for you—
their probes slick with
the scentless oils of technicians—

for whom I must
be opened, peeled back, forced
to look. And I did, as I was told—

not relax—exactly—but give myself up
to your co-conspirators, who dug you
out of the blankness of my flesh,

parted the dark waters and suddenly
you came forth
a smudge of white against the ultrasound’s

blackness, you floated spectral and thickly
pale, a magnolia in a bowl,
an elegant centerpiece. You had no heart,

were as minimal as a Mobius strip.
But you had style. Even your dying
was oddly stylish, the way you resembled

more and more each day a comet,
the wan tail of you grew
longer, more tenuous on the screen.

I saw you calmly
and with endearing gravity take a nose dive
until the light blinked out and I was

no longer a house for an uninvited guest,
nor heaven for a gauzy constellation.
The screen went dark and I came back

to myself. I was no longer a ghost’s ghost.
I was myself again. I was flesh. And living.