“Our bodies are mysterious because they are alive.”

-Dr. Doris Taylor, Director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair at the University of Minnesota


A “ghost heart,” she calls it.

Lifeless, suspended in a glass dome

between worlds.  
The lab is full of them.

Time pings off the glass like a swarm of insects

at night—yet inside there is no night.

No rhythm. No sleep. No end.
*
She rinses the dead heart,

injects its rubbery walls with stem cells,

flips the old organs like houses.
*
In the lab they speak of hearts

as “dead” or “alive.” Meaning what? Is there such

thing as the life

of a heart, a heart-like life? If so, it’s possible that a dead one

wouldn’t even be a heart anymore. It wouldn’t be any kind of thing.

A “ghost” then, as she calls it,

if we can speak of the body and not just the spirit

as ghost.
*
When she filled the first heart

with living cells, it didn’t start beating

immediately. A tiny pacemaker was attached.

Days passed,

then Harald and Thomas called her from the lab.
*
A rosy flush

like dawn creeps into the flesh …
*
A stem cell

can divide indefinitely, and in this it resembles God.

It is necessary and sufficient for skin and bones and eyes and lungs,

teeth and hands and hair

and heart.

But it is none of those things.

It’s might, maybe, perhaps, the incarnate what-if

of every organ, an idea in the flesh.
*
The lab fills with plums, ripening

organs suspended

in glass bells, the spell of death

slept off like a fairytale.
Half-orphan, half-parent,

they hang like sleeping birds, like orchids,

like smoked meats,

cocoons, candied apples, like oysters yet to be plucked

from their shells.  
They swell in imitation of a world

they don’t fully recall, waken to a future

we can barely imagine,
tiny beating hearts,
first fruit in the kingdom

of first fruit.