THE FORENSIC PATHOLOGY OF ABSENCE

They say he lived in those hills,
Absent of companionship, as long as anyone could remember, till he got cut,
That is. And his beating heart, with no medic
To rescue him, pumped until his death,

Squeezing chambers and corpuscles, to death.
And blood, like water, flows downhill;
Seeks its own level, the lowest point, alone, hermetic
And out of sight, until being absorbed again, under the uncut

Grass. What doesn’t kill you may still cut;
But veins dissected on a table, after death,
Do not bleed nearly so much as the fresh and the living that the medic
Tries to save, after rushing onto the battlefield beyond the hill…

The contours of human muscle, laid bare, are like hills
With their once flowing rivers eternally dammed, cut,
Exposed and coagulating beyond reversal, beyond the medic’s
Alchemy. And not dammed to produced power but death.

But nobody knew he got cut, living alone as he did, up in the hills,
And bled to death, in the absence of a medic.

© 2016 Lawrence Moebs

The Big Windows Review 7 (Spring 2016)