Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it.
--Tom Stoppard
 
The embryo transitions through
its nomenclature: blastocyst before, foetus now.
You eat. Jovial sometimes to disregard
the diet you’ve been on since sixteen,
other times wondering if humans
can really be grown by potato skins
and antenatal vitamins
alone.
By now, the heart and its chambers
should have completed their structuration;
the organisation of the body into organs,
mostly complete, limbs recognisable,
tail receding back into primordial inheritance.
They will refer you for tests, which you can
refuse, if you are brave, or fearful,
or bravely afraid of the choices they may
ask you to make, what the choices will say
about your child, about you and the way
you progress through a checklist:

   age
   history of congenital abnormality
   history of inherited physical or psychiatric disease
   previous positive blood tests
   previous miscarriages
   previous babies 
   previous babies who died
   all the past tenses
 
First, however, they must confirm the viability 
 
   listen
 
your body may already be talking with you

                              (though there is no real preparation).
 
The gradual diminuendo of nausea and fatigue,
light spotting, a Rorschach on your underwear,
cryptic and beyond interpolation, a lifting
of the possession — faculties no longer dominated
by the visitor within. Carefully, you explain
your symptoms. The obstetrician is calm, states:
 
“There are only two types of news I can give you today:
good news or bad news.”
 
The ultrasound resembles the dappling of the moon,
black and white in continuous spectrum,
dead volcanoes, impact craters, the crimped footprints
of past astronauts, and there within its
small membranous sac, your tethered explorer.
Before you receive the news, legs open
to the slightly cool air, the lubricated wand
exploring your astronomical body,
even your untrained eye can see
the dark side, the extinguished candle
heralding the knowledge that eclipses all;
the stillness and the absence, the terrible
quiet of the heart. 




Stoppard, Tom. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Faber and Faber, 1966.