According to integral calculus I can approach the medical complex — its structures make the exact shape of themselves in the setting sun — but never reach it. Some kind of nirvana. The distance between two bodies infinitely divided, infinitely never to merge. But with the ultrasound wand they call transvaginal, here, I am examined and probed. * First sonogram, the sound of an empty sphere. Eclipsed. Two water rings on a mahogany table — the wet rings the cup’s lifting leaves behind. The cursor on the screen marks out potential space, lines drawn from x to x. * An integral is not the curve, not the function, but the surrounding space defined by it. Above the x-axis, an addition; below x takes away. The screen shows only what falls below, dead curve, in monochrome. * The raga of carnatic music means to color or dye. Hue or tint. The tones of the scale make named melodies: six males, five wives, eight sons and daughters-in-law, an entire intangible family. * The dimensions of the white rings are sounded, diameter and attachment to each other and to my own sealed darkness. * Each raga optimally saturates distinct hours, at a certain angle of sunlight. Oblique blue dawn, acute yellow noon, violet flatline dusk. Often these melodies assume the forms of gods. * Lord Ganesha, elephant-headed god, remover of obstacles, carries for weapons an axe (to sever) and a noose (to close off). Also something sweet. Also his own broken tusk. * I carry the alive (and not alive) for weeks. A conch shell is the definition of a hand. Hand to navel: a call to a complexly primal heart. I blow breath through and expect an answer back, as the ocean would. * The quadrant in which a curve may appear is a field. It vibrates. The grass is the bell, sun the ringing. A crow might land there, two plotted points in dirt. It might open its mouth, unstrangle morning from its throat. The sun might be a sitar. Your ear might not recognize the melody, but your skin does. It hues pink. A burn made of coordinate points, and also, because I breathe, all points it does not contain, or could contain, or would love if it did contain. * Two ragas may contain the same number of tones but have different renderings. A raga that does not ascend or descend according to the pattern is called crooked. * This time, this one will not come true. Fever and waves of nausea. The doctor calls what needs to be removed tissues. An imaginary number on the backside of the graph. * Mathmatically, other planes could exist. Gravity so intense the curve of a cosine sags and draws the entire graph down with it. It cries when it falls through. That place without water. * When Krisha was a blue baby, he ate dirt and didn’t tell his mother. She could see his full cheeks, knew what he had done. Open your mouth, she said, which is symmetrical to, let there be light. Blue baby Krishna opened his mouth, pulse of distant light behind his teeth. * Wake. A crescent moon, like a clipped nail, follows me to surgery. Anesthesia rolls down like night again. The last I see, a blue disc of light by which I am opened. The morning raga presses its orange into me, curls up like smoke that does not signify burning: cast off, a nameless scale.

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.