Ferdinand Bauer, Digitalis Obscura, 1821
Courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library

In the winter city a scientist
propelled by some frantic purpose hunts
the heart’s electric eccentricities,
its affinity for chaos. Snow clots
on the St. Lawrence docks, on his sleeping
children’s windows, muffles the late bells
murmuring over his laboratory

where he is found near death, subject to self-
experiment, perhaps, or impulses
veiled in recess and echo, resisting
revelation. All night doctors labor
to coax his garbled heart back toward syntax,
to salvage rhythm they call for the foxglove’s
extract, killer and savior shock knotted
within its leaves—poison enough to hush
haywire signals, or summon haphazard
cadence, delirium’s clamor. Silence.
If spring comes, if winter lifts its glass lid,
I should show them to my son, the foxgloves,
these dead man’s bells I pass without naming.
I should, I know, show him a night I’ve kept
under a clear dome in a locked chamber:

Called away, we race to the hospital
from a wedding (I in daffodil silk
wilting) to find our small son calm, almost
unharmed from his charge at a table’s edge.
The doctor busied with his instruments
speaks—not to me—as through a diving bell
I hear a scar and might as well, he wants
to place two sutures in our baby’s head
to hide the mark of our tremendous luck
from all but touch, or sharp regard—so
he pins the little arms, traps them inside
a pillowcase missing its dinosaurs.

And I, a mother whose body has known
helplessness, its terror—I his mother,
his faithless mother, allow this violence.
I hold my son, his heart again beneath
my own skin a live wire quivering, wild.
Below his eyes petechiae rise red
like the staccato strike of shot freckling
the pheasant’s breast: he is screaming so hard
his capillaries burst—Oh, it’s harmless,
nothing permanent,
I’m assured. Nothing
permanent except my shame, and frailty’s
ferocious sting: my failure to admit
my love’s no shield fit to save him from chance
or time, which will not—cannot—spare us
any more than spring may spare the snow.

At home that night I did not sleep, nor fill
the silences I feared. I held him, limp
and sweating. With supplicant lips I kissed
the current flowing in his wrist. I traced
his petechiae without waking him,
as the bee, departing, skims the speckles
peppering the foxglove’s hollow heart.

—Carolyn Oliver



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