.
.
.
Microscopy
What’s under our skins?
Show me –
through an illustrated cut-out,
an incision
or window – what lies
under soft
and folded flesh.
What’s in there?
Zoom in, then in once more
to see. Cell structures
revealed by swirls stained
purple. Vacuoles,
membranes – pores
endowed
with intelligence! Chemical
locks, chemical
keys – receptors.
Shapes.
What’s under our skins?
(My mother knew – from
autopsies and slides).
Away from the flaws
and heat,
the embarrassments
of flesh –
attentive
and schooled
in the wonders
of magnification,
my mother
in her working days
spent hours
at the microscope.
What’s under our skins –
our skulls?
The more you magnify,
the closer in –
cellular, molecular,
atomic, sub-atomic -
everything starts
to look strangely the same.
Is that a womb, or a brain?
Fundamental
and fundamental.
Shapes.
Coils of DNA, twitchy
in a nucleus –
the secret codes and keys
accounting for the ways
my mother and I
are alike and unalike.
My mother –
who pored over
The Double Helix
when it first came out –
who could write lines
in a trip journal like:
our capable guide endlessly
over-informed us.
I stay informed.
I read about the frontiers of biology –
Virus,
prion, shred
of protein.
Electron sharing and bonds
creeping along the boundaries
between
living and non-living –
things known,
and not yet known
in her time,
her prime.
On that last trip
for which she kept a journal,
(she’d been a widow for more
than a decade by then)
she woke thinking she’d slept
all night and it was breakfast.
It wasn’t.
It was dinner. Some other
travelers set her straight
and she wrote:
I was informed that I was dis-oriented.
Shapes and
chemicals create
relationships.
Tastes and tics, a way
of making
sentences.
A preferred way
to spend your days.
Until reaching a point
at which you,
or yours (on
your behalf) say:
This isn’t
what I’d call living…
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About the Author: Sue Blaustein is the author of “In the Field, Autobiography of an Inspector”. Her information can be found at www.sueblaustein.com. Recently she contributed a poem to a “The Subtle Forces” podcast episode and was interviewed on the “Blue Collar Gospel Hour”. A retiree, she blogs for Milwaukee’s Ex Fabula, serves as an interviewer/writer for the “My Life My Story” program at the Zablocki VA Medical Center, and chases insects at the Milwaukee Urban Ecology Center.
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Image Credit: Frances Benjamin Johnston “Students in a science class using microscopes, Western High School, Washington, D.C.” (1899) The Library of Congress
As It Ought To Be 