Get Back to Where You Once Belonged

If you practice, the New Age guru said,
you can learn how to switch off synapses
to the amygdala and hippocampus,
open a door to the womb, even run
barefoot through the constellations!

Fidgeting in the back row,
I wondered if I could see the sun
on July 6,1954,
jimmy my eyelids in the maternity ward,
the moon sleepwalk with its lunch box
from a Siberian missile silo, Nixon
blow out candles on his party's cake.

Could I worm my way into the eye
of Pocahontas Boy at Roosevelt Raceway,
or was I doomed to enter the red speck
on the trout Eisenhower caught
during his Colorado vacation,
the wound on the French soldier
floating down the Mekong River?

I followed the guru's orders,
let my breaths seep slower
and slower from my nose.

When the spotlights dimmed
and the stage grew vast
and dark as at the beginning,
all I saw was a firefly
tap out a coded love song,
then bow and vanish behind a curtain.

Henry Hart
Denver Quarterly
Volume 40, Number 4
2006

Copyright © 2006 by the University of Denver,
Denver Colorado, 80208.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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