Ultrasound

Above sound you are sensed
after the thin smear of conductive jelly is applied
to your mother’s belly by the efficient radiographer.

She finds her bearings. On the screen there’s
a confused ordering as the pixels arrange themselves
in black and white. I live ‘real-time’ I see you

my unborn, not knowing who you are, only what…
In real measurement you are sized by electronic gauge.
You are fifteen millimetres from head to toe

making you, in this very real time, eight-weeks-old.
There’s utter certainty in this calculation, nothing
refutable, as the second nurse rotates her

ready reckoner to predict your birth day: on or around
The Fourth of June.  In one of many such moments,
I am not here, holding your mother’s hand,

as if watching my life like another’s narrative
at one remove, abstracted, beside myself, I am become
Television; an iris struggling to focus on its own reflection.

I wander in and out of my own consciousness; in this
Pregnancy Support Unit, a framed print hangs on the wall, 
revamped neo-kitsch showing an unpeopled, cool

Mediterranean interior with flowers, coffee-table, arches
and terrace, giving on to blue ocean and featureless landscape.
Is this as soothing as it gets? Its anodyne impartiality offends me.

I keep looking, imagining my self in this eternally sunny holiday
apartment. Do I really want to go there? Why am I telling you
this my first unborn, my first with no name?

A cursor moves on the screen; suddenly I am pulled back
into externality – you are moving, your heart beats. I hold your
mother’s hand, her fingers playing in time to your heart

beating with your life, mine, hers, ours. As if it were unexpected,
as if it were unknown, as if it were unforetold, unguessed, unsaid
unfelt, unseen. This tear comes to my mind, so that, for a second,

the whole universe focuses itself on this moment of its creation
and I fitted, fitting into a web, connected like I’ve never felt. As if 
all of history, life, every molecule is somehow focused here.

Through you I am completed, my first unborn. The image
a truncated cone, inky black and mottled white like a negative 
torch beam - a sonar, a radar, a soundscape printing of life,
an eye of womb in which you sit at the centre of my, our thought.
In this room where only months before your unborn sibling
receded from our sight and sound…black light illumines

my thought as if the soundscape were entering my brain, 
registering an image, creating its own print, an index of my
narrative, where two other lives now intersect in time.

Where love meets, where hands touch, where thoughts slow
where your heart beats, not slow, not quick:
alive; alive; alive; alive; alive

Giles Sutherland

October 2009