… so called because it shows a rhythmical
pulsation produced by the flow of blood
in the vessels of the brain.
—Webster’s
The boggy spot atop her skull,
which would at birth accommodate
the whole pad of my thumb, of late
has disappeared—parietal
bones now fused into a full
and obdurate concavity.
How comforting to know that she
no longer is so vulnerable,
at least in that one crucial place.
But part of me half-misses it,
the chink in her small basinet,
and tempts me almost to embrace
the crackpot views of those poor nuts
who have nostalgically trepanned
themselves, or had themselves trepanned;
by drilling through their sinciputs,
they draw more blood into the brain
—supposedly—and thus restore
the magic buoyancy of yore,
that infantile, Wordsworthian
consciousness extinguished by
the closing of their crania.
No need for such a mania,
however, since already I
detect that some new aperture,
pierced in me when she was born
as if by tiny unicorn,
has widened out in pace with her
own portal’s slow diminishment.
I sense it, this phenomenon,
not in my head but lower down:
a fluttering thoracic vent
that, artesian, lets feeling well,
then pumps it forth in measured spate
to course and lap and irrigate
—a kind of second fontanelle.
—Ben Downing
