Sea Change

Lauren Folk

I.

The screen shifts and mutates,
revealing nothing to me, the owner
of this vastness, a bizarre
internal landscape.
My ovary is a black hole,
greedy-looking and gaping,
yawning in the murk.
The technician asks if I am alright.
I want to ask her the same question,

Am I alright?

The ultrasound wand holds its own kind of magic,
I suppose—
an uncomfortable intrusion that says

you must be invaded

in order to be seen.
 

II.

In the same year the American Civil War ended,
Ivan Aivazovsky painted Storm on the North Sea.

The night-cast seascape is dark and romantic;
clouds obscure the moon but not its brightness
glinting against the water,
surges beginning to gentle

as the storm passes.

It has left a ship listing, sails tucked tidily away.
A rock, or an overturned lifeboat—

how shadowy this scene,

how dim the moon!—

cradles the few survivors...

three? four? The shadows make it difficult to count,

the figures in some reproductions

appearing only as silhouettes.

Two of them beckon to the mother ship,

hailing her, begging her to right herself

and come back to them,

or perhaps only waving farewell.

III.

This one is less painful than the last,

though there is still some discomfort

in the cautious probing of the wand,

the ebb and flow of its movements.

I cannot look away from the screen,

expecting at any moment to see

something, recognizable as friend

or foe. I think about how researchers

were finally able to perform a

sonogram on a pregnant manta ray.

They dove down sixteen fathoms

to where the mantas slow their

speed for the cleaner fish. The

divers approached from above with

their specially designed ultrasound

wands and captured images from

the secret places of the manta below

as she waited patiently to be free to go.

IV.

If Leonardo da Vinci invented sonar

by sticking a tube in the water to listen for ships,

then I think perhaps the technician should

switch tools—

set down the transducer

and the bottle of surgical-grade lube—

press a tube to the delicate skin of my abdomen,

place her ear to the other end,

and do things the old-fashioned way,

the way Leo intended.

I do not tell her this

but the tube lingers in my mind

with each seasick sway of her wand.

V.

If this body is an ocean

(O hungry sea):

The barnacled uterus (Inverted)

is a ship.

It sails, adrift,

under the skin of the ocean.

The right ovary (Enlarged)

and the left (Not Visualized)

are lifeboats, or

perhaps they are the rocks,

made treacherous by the rough licks

of salt-sharp waves,

to which the survivors may attempt to cling.

Of the tempest within

(full fathom five thy organs lie):

Sky and swell roil together,

scattered moonlight

shattering on the water.

Later, I will try to decipher

the movement of the brine,

clutching the wet stone,

salted,

sea-changing

into something rich and strange.

If this storm passes.

If this storm passes.