My Mother’s Body Interrogated By Light

This is what happened
Someone lifted a grey translucency to the light
and held it there
seeing the knit fracture in the clavicle
the branching ribs
the starry scatter of the bronchial tree
across the lung field a cloudy shadow

The way when we were kids she’d call us down
to see a rain-swept spider’s web
or against the kitchen window a leek sliced with light

This is what happened
Inside her body’s driftwood coracle
she held her breath her ribs coalesced
around a darkness they could read on a screen

The way she might have read the dark
of flint in chalk or a painting’s thick colour

Meaning brought into light
a green circle
held by a membrane on a glass slide

*

This is what happened
The surgeon cut the echo of my mother’s shoulder
conchoidal bony with light

Her breath was a bird caught in the thoracic cage
The porous leaves that were the wings of birds
rustled as he parted the branches
the ropes of the sail that shadowed the lung

In the cavity of her body
his hands with their instruments
tethered the branches drew knotted filaments
around the artery the venous trunks
the cartilaginous rings of the bronchial tree

The way her fingers threading a skein of colour
anchored patterns jottings silks
the names of children a network of reminders
the memorial lattice of the living

His wrists in the ribs’ net he cut death out
lifted it in its darkened flap clear of the body

The hands with their curved steel catching bone
threading filaments through muscle
resealing the fatty layers the unpeeled skin
might have been the hands of a crew mending a sail
that would float her out beyond the nodule
that new thing as strange as any flint picked up a beach

The way she’d waited once for a cocoon to hatch
a butterfly to struggle out breath
rippling the skeins the netted wing
of the scapula lifting a lacy shadow

*

This is what happened
before we knew that her hands would stiffen as twigs
that her brain would fail to solve the intricacies of a knot

before we knew that the nodule had seeded itself
invisibly along the branches of the blood
moving in that colour we see now when we lift our hands
instrumentless to the light