Memory of Mammoth Cave, Provoked by a Pelvic Ultrasound

You’ll hear three sounds
created by the blood rushing through the uterus.
The uterus is made of several muscles—
the blood moving through each gives a different music ... 

——

in the white-washed office, instruments of unusual revelation.

the organ, translated, aimed to stain me; gleaned glossolalia from the waves.

low throbs of an amphibian throat or the methuselah creep of groundwater.

once, as a girl, i touched the dew of groundwater.

a wanton palimpsest, that labyrinth, which all birth imitates.

i bore witness: the way gypsum leaps from cave walls is a brightness like a sound.

& bright this black, attests its roots: glow, gleam, absolute.

i was a child. i trembled, realizing i had already lived.

the organ knows. the organ tells on itself—calls me a side effect of time, an accident.

small lives living separately as one. failure & shed. sex & red revival. minor frisson of apoptosis & the cells’ wet gasping splits.

i bore witness: a primordial darkness, dense as the nerves’ charge that originates all thought.

the descent less a mimicry of death than a vision of death bound to its opposite:

a serpent skinning.

i: plurality, an accidental. creature chording high & low kingdoms. a trinity roars sharp from my bloodwet gut.

louder than i was ever told, that cosmos of hidden rivers. i bore witness:

in the hollows, a vantablack to make the head whirl, as consummate as God’s passing back,

which i & under-earth commune with. which exhales & is sentient.