An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine
There Was Beauty in That Graph
There was beauty in that graph
when they kick-started your heart’s
cold chambers while you lay
sanitized, anaesthetized, anatomized.
You faltered up to the shock
of a cunning little current,
plotted harsh blips of green in
measured space of x-axis and y
that told me you
were suspended in half-swing
between motion and stillness.
Two hours of heaven.
Then the heart graph
cracked into old-man squiggles,
a cardiac doodling
second by milli-second
convex up and concave down
up-down…up…down…down
down…shuffling into
a straight line equation
I shall never forget.
I dream of drifting now
along a slope into
the void without name
where plus and minus infinity meet.