The Mole

After love discovers it, the little burn or birthmark in an odd spot he can neither see nor reach; after the internist's downturned mouth, specialists leaning over him like diviners, machines reading his billion cells; after the onslaught of insight, cures crawling through him like infestations, so many surgeries a wrong move leaves him leaking like overripe fruit; after the mountain aster and ice wine, Michigan football,Canes Venatici and the Four North Fracture Zone shrink to a room where voices grow hushed as if at some holy place, and even in the kindest eye there lurks the eternity to which he's been commended; after speech, touch, even the instinct to eat are gone, and he has become nothing but a collection of quiet tics and twitches as if something wanted out of his riddled bones, the carious maze of his brain; as the last day glaciers into his room, glass and chrome so infinites- imally facet- ed it seems he lives inside a diamond, he breaks into a wide smile, as if joy were the animal in him, blind, scrabbling, earth- covered creature tunneling up from God knows where to stand upright, feasting on distances, gazing dead into the sun.