Coming to After the Endoscopy

To be a conscious cell
in the body of God, says a friend,
is her job––or perhaps her aspiration; her calling.

Fresh from my endoscopy, in which my job
as featured subject is to play a piece of meat
with a heart, host for a small fleck of esophagus

to be excised and examined by scientists
who charge three or four figures an hour,
I return to consciousness as a pair of lungs

and an idle mind, hoping only not to be
a conscious cell in God’s nether region
or inner ear or navel, but somehow

to land and grow like a little blinking neuron
in God’s brain, maybe even the cerebellum,
lighting up when The Deity imagines a new world

much like our own, with more carbon-based life forms,
but ones that spend their days in praise,
first singing, then dancing, then sculpting wonder,

always wonder, then learning to cut
diamonds in a hundred facets and set them
in platinum, and then resting––the way God rested

on the Seventh Day, completely content,
at peace––certain that every task
sufficient unto this day has been done.

***

Will received his bachelor’s degree in English history and literature from Harvard College. He has attended numerous writing workshops with Marie Howe, Thea Sullivan, Gail Mazur, Robert Pinsky, Alan Shapiro, and Mark Doty. Will Walker’s work has appeared in Alabama Literary Review, Apricity Magazine, Bark, and more. His chapbook, Carrying Water, was published by Pudding House Press, and his full-length collection, Wednesday After Lunch, is a Blue Light Press Book Award Winner (2008).