Chapters Literary Arts Center & Bookstore

capillary, fragmentary,
bled and bleeding out, a kind of river delta, spreading like the
root-like
veining of the heart or ganglia of nerve cells off the spine,
the spine itself a slight meander, rooted to the ground, branch-
ing to a cloud,
my heart, my spine, my cloud, the X-rays coldly spiritual, the
invisible made visible.
Of the six shapes in nature, the oval, the circle, and the hexa-
gon all close,
suggesting symmetry, endings as beginnings, the egg, the
moon, the perfect snow,
geometry and physics of completion, symbols of certainty, the
formal beauty of arrival.
That loving shape of the limb on the dying elm, how far from
where it started,
still growing, even now, toward ending, the way a river and its
runoff end.

From Old Heart: Poems Copyright 2007 by Stanley Plumly