B.J. Buckley

Radiology: Cranial Film

 
           "... and the light moved across the face of the deep .."

                                                                The Book of Genesis

Magic lantern show – and we,
like children in a dark theater,
awed by the mysterious flickering window –

Camera: an enclosed chamber,
a room, that cave where Plato
said we rested in the dark,

where one by one our memories
were taken, to shield us
from the pain of too much knowing.

Up there, lit from behind, and within,
the convoluted cave is glowing: eternal
labyrinth where all will lose their way.

Remember, as children, holding
negatives up to light? – and the pale
figures boxed there shimmered

like the ghosts they were before
we were born: flowered dresses,
fedoras, little anklets

with lace on the cuffs, tiny
patent leather shoes. Inside
the nautilus shell of skull,

some soft mollusk-self, some
shade is dancing left to right,
across the bridge, or sliding down

into that oldest reptile heart:
light and warm, a yes; cold
and dark, a no; and the soul,

then, almost unborn: the play
of a small brightness on
infinite and oceanic shadow.

B.J. Buckley is a Montana poet and writer who has worked in Arts in Schools and Communities programs throughout the West and Midwest for more than four decades. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Grub Street, About Place Journal, Sequestrum, december, CutThroat: A Journal of the Arts, Aesthetica, Hole in the Head Review, Sugar House Review, and The Southern Humanities Review Online, among others. Her chapbook, In January, the Geese, won the 35th Anniversary 2021 Comstock Review Poetry Chapbook Prize.