Sunday Poem

Borborygmi

The experts now say that bowel sounds don’t matter

That tinkling awakening of the gut

Like all timeworn customs, time shatters.

When to feed used to be so open and shut

Whether ileus, post traumatic
We listened first, it was axiomatic

Lightly press the stethoscope for guidance

A gray moon in early dusk

But it’s a hollowed-out husk

Here there is something worse than silence

A conch against your ear

But it’s not the ocean, I fear,

It’s all the air in the world rushing to escape;

Breathe deep, before you suffocate

In dreams I linger here, convinced I hear something stirring

Or is it the bed creaking, the diaphragm shifting on your skin

Absent bowel sounds, absent sin

Or just forgotten?

Where have you gone?

I wake thrashing to a shrill whirring

Of wings beating in the early dawn

All we used to know and have, sadly misbegotten

I didn’t want to proceed until I heard a sign you were alive

You must stay right here under my watchful eye

But now they say those sounds never mattered---

You’re free to go.

In the silent winter I went crunching through the snow

To the edge of the creek and stamped my boots

Until all the thick black ice shattered

There’s so much to see below

Sticks and stones, dead leaves, broken off roots.

What would I do instead?

Fall prone and, against the frozen slab, press my ear?

I’d be afraid of what I might hear

Flat against the snow, a shudder, a rising shiver

The flow of a hidden eternal river

Or worse, a nothingness, the feeble sound of the dead