In Praise of the 30-Week Ultrasound

Clouds by John Singer Sargent, watercolor on paper, 1897. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A wholeness moves within all half-seen things,
a certain gravity when pigeons call
beyond the eye’s periphery, and rainfall pings
against the windows of the hospital.
We see a face we cannot see—a child
of shifting grays, topography and sound.
And I imagine how our bodies fill
this dim, transparent person: our marrow found
inside her bones, her throat an open well
our memories all circle through like birds.
In every pixelated vein and cell,
we live like joyful ghosts. We see in her
the selves we see in clouds, electric wires
in fog, the afterimages of fires.