Walking through the heart

At the children's museum, I'd lose myself
in the model of the heart.
Up the narrow stairs into the right ventricle,
I was blood
pumped by the great slow bear
beating somewhere ahead.

The latex walls were candled by light
as if the heart were its own source
or had its own source
I would find at some turning
before the stairs
that brought me down into the museum again.

Under the microscope, two heart cells
separately pulsing:
Watch them touch, and, without knowing,
synchronize, and beat together.

I can think of you and never know
what you are thinking,
hold you, sweetly breathing, without expecting
my breath to catch
like yours.  I followed you
walking bare-headed in the rain
through the dangerous park,
each of us imagining the other's anger
wrongly.  Yet at the sound of my voice

turn, speak, no code to be broken; touch
that leaves us unchanged
but touched; nothing,
everything, out of the ordinary.

Looking at something so ordinary
I don't know how to see it:
the heaped sleeve of a woman writing,
her words like a tapestry appearing
alongside her figure on the painted screen.
With the sound of the koto
the wind in the pines of the mountain peak
seems to communicate - one sound opening into
the other. With which note shall I begin,
she asks, and asking, chooses
neither windblown note
but a third sound, out of time,
like a door thrown open
between this light and her own.

The two of us at the prow; the bored guide
poling our boat down the underground river.
In this limestone cave, lucent, flesh-like rock
is tamed, renamed the Hanging Gardens,
Satan's Beard.  Plant spores from tourists' jackets
grow under the spotlights on the cave walls;
we are the cave's only other life.
At water's edge, we're stopped.  Beyond, a fall
of rocks, the hum of a generator.
The guide turns off every light.  All darkness:
I am alone in it (tell myself we)
the slow eye of darkness unbearable,
and to be borne, alone.  And a part of us
as surely as the sudden return of light.