Feeling melancholy this afternoon for some reason and found this piece sitting on my hard drive. It's several years old now and it's never seen the light of day before but the internet is largely anonymous, so what the heck...

Something a bit sad for a similar sad mood.

The Scan

She shows me the scan, my desert island girl,
(because I answered the secret party question honestly?).
Thin white lines trace an abstract pattern until laughing,
She points out a head, the torso and an arm;
The contours of new life made manifest.

Braced only for the ache caused by my wound of useless love,
I am instead surprised by sudden sacred wonder,
And in that moment catch fire with joy;

Human,
Eternal,
Unquenchable!

Leaping like grace from her doubly radiant body.

In the darkness of her absence,
This flame burns on, apart;
And I must use its pure intensity,
To cauterise the contours of my heart.

I guess you guys are a bit too deep for me. I'm troubled by: "(because I answered the secret party question honestly?)" and "Leaping like grace from her doubly radiant body." Is it about someone who never had someone love them and then finds it (and now she's gone)? I think I like the last verse/stanza best. Maybe because of my need for rhyme. (laughs at self). It seems most poetry posted here is of the sad variety. Assuming that is correct, I wonder why.

Thanks for your comments Chuck.

I know it isn't obvious in the 2nd line what's going on but I didn't want to make the whole situation too explicit. I thought it was OK to leave a bit of mystery and imagination there and allow the reader to try to fill in the gaps for him or herself. So long as you get the general impression that the narrator is wondering why the "desert island girl" shows him the scan and coming up with a theory, a bit of ambiguity doesn't matter. Again, I know it isn't obvious why she is a "desert island girl" but if you understand it as a general term of endearment you've got the point.

I hope there were enough clues to tell you that the scan is a pregnancy scan and the hence the "doubly" radiant body is radiant from the woman and her unborn child.

This piece is supposed to be about an unrequited love ("useless" as described in the poem) and the narrator's attempt to come to terms with this ("cauterising the heart") by taking some kind of spiritual comfort from the simple wonder of the woman's pregnancy.

If it needs this much explanation then it hasn't really worked :-(

I'm glad you liked the last stanza. It is deliberately structured so that, that is the only rhyme 'cos I thought it was more powerful to finish on a rhyming couplet.

I suspect the partial explanation for your last comment is that sadness is a better motivator for writing than happiness. A full explanation would say why, but I can't answer than one.

Oh wow, now I really feel dumb. I never suspected pregnancy. Now that you have helped me along, I can see your "clues". I certainly think it reads much better. I think I figured out why I got mislead from the beginning. Your preamble mentioned the Internet and hard drive. I have a scanner to my left...so I went down the wrong path and thought the wrong kind of scan (sheepish grin). As to "desert island girl", I thought it was a way of saying this person was the one you'd pick to be marooned on a desert island with. Anyway, now that I understand it, I think it's really nice. Thanks for sharing.

Ah, now I can see how that preamble didn't help! Pretty dumb preamble (but at least the "desert island girl" bit made sense).

Wow amazing DMFW. Sorry I can't be more constructive. I don't write poetry. Well not really. Don't feel too bad Chuck. I didn't see it at first either.

There were enough clues for me. Life is beautiful isn't it. I can think of no death worse than bleeding out during childbirth.

Yeah, TJ, I was waiting to see what you thought. You two seem very similar.

I pretty well followed the whole thing but interpreted it a bit differently. I saw it as a poem of loss rather than unrequited love, thinking perhaps the woman had died before or during child birth. Though that second stanza should have clued me in. Not too far off the mark? The whole thing seems to work pretty well for me, mood wise. jon

It is very interesting to me to see how people have interpreted this poem. I always knew that there was a certain amount of ambiguity there (and maybe in a lot of poems). I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to make the reader work at the interpretation even if it sometimes goes off on a somewhat different line from the one intended by the author. In this case, perhaps because the feeling I was trying to express was so clear in my own mind, it didn't even occur to me that some of these other ideas were possible! The woman isn't supposed to have died in childbirth (the 2nd stanza and the present tense are the clue) but I can now see how the last stanza might make you think that...

Once you said it was a pregnancy it all came together, but I'm too much a geek: I read the situation totally different and not very complimentary from the poem. Between the scan and the secret party question, my mind went deep into left field - 3 stadiums off in a really bad neighborhood. I think the second line really throws people. It seems like it is incredibly important to the poem, yet it doesn't lead to anything. (Unless you're a sick, cynical person like I am.) The fifth line and the last stanza are the strongest parts of the poem. They came out incredibly well. If you re-do the second line (or just dump it since your poem is somewhat asymetrical anyway) it would really make the poem come alive (and in the way you meant.)