Persistent Measures  

“Her heart is strong,” assures the ICU nurse—
minutes before we deem the aid to cease,
whose own strength has kept said organ

pulsing so putting out those electromagnetic
proofs of power and life that lie supine
with mother whose dearth of motion

indicates that sovereignty and self-maintenance
lie elsewhere than the beat and big vessels
sprouting like a spray of blossoms

from a fertile soil stable in the cycles of the sun
and rain, unlike her struck body those ministering
could not stabilize in the hours and days

following her meeting with mistaken metal
and its unfeeling ire I have taken for my own,
a title transference, unspoken, which will sit

in an isolated archive in the center behinds barbs
and blocks, my own redoubt, safe for uncertain
years in its own ribbed and red strength