You are not to move,
you are unmovable,
you flatten like a fish
from the deep,
internally illuminated,
see-through.
The white belly of waiting hums.
You want to holler inside
and answer your own echo—
this is how science works.
The white belly bangs.
Like filings and shavings
your life begins to align
into a silhouette
then striates rainbows.
One of those is of your father.
He’d spark his days away
in the hulls of battleships
stick welding barbettes, armor,
bulkheads, then stumble home
with cigarettes and booze
slanting from his mouth.
He’d turn the night into dark.
His hands would knot
around the banister
not so much as a dove
on a branch but as a mother
pinning her child to her breast.
The white belly still bangs.
Your father, you think.
He could not be here now.
The years of fusing steel
to other, harder alloys
sunk metal bits under his skin.
Even his eyes were freckled with iron.
And the unseen tectonics of these magnets
would drag that metal out of him
and perhaps seem a spirit
cleaving from the body.
You couldn’t blame him,
do not blame him.
Those smallest, most telling parts
are often found incidentally,
like how the oldest parts of Earth
were found on the moon.
An intercom crackles
in the white belly.
This machine breaks you down
so that your fluency
in the universe is pronounced,
you are not to pronounce it.