77.15 Kelvin — Blackbird Archive

← v18n1, Spring 2019

After her second shot the artist starts to talk about

Cryonics of all things, the initiate of her boyfriend

Who attends such conferences. . . . Freeze me, baby!

He once said to her, the height of their bodily passion.

Of all the absurd, most passionate, climactic words

Surely there are worse. One can only imagine

What jettisons between them. Twelve thousand bucks

For the brain floating in vitro, free of the scuttled

Skiff of the line-tangled body, a cool quarter mil

For the whole nine yards, every finger, toe,

As if at 77.15 kelvin we found heaven,

The boiling point of liquid nitrogen

Flushed through the xylem of each dead organ,

The bodies upright in their silver cells, some new

Hal singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” each eyebrow

White as snow. One by one the banks drain

The trust accounts. Ward of the frozen state

Your lifelong partner croons by the power

Of his attorney. No prince wakes you

Ever from your glass sleep, or duly waits on you,

Vigilant as a Millerite counting on some

Nineteenth-century New York hillside

The clouded arrhythmia of Christ.

The artist pours another straight up, no ice,

Figures the crystalline rapture’s a vessel

Rigged with time, scaffolds into nothingness,

Ghosted with minds.

mortality science love

Stephen Haven

Stephen Haven is the author of three collections of poetry, The Last Sacred Place in North America (New American Press, 2012), winner of the New American Poetry Prize; Dust and Bread (Turning Point, 2008), winner of the 2009 Ohio Poet of the Year Award; and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks (West End Press, 2004). He is also the author of a memoir, The River Lock: One Boy’s Life along the Mohawk (Syracuse University Press, 2008). His poetry and collaborative translations from contemporary Chinese poetry have appeared in The American Poetry Review , The Common , Consequence Magazine , Image , North American Review , Parnassus , Salmagundi , The Southern Review , and World Literature Today , among others . Haven has twice been a Fulbright professor at universities in Beijing and has received five individual artist grants from the Ohio Arts Council. He is a professor of English at Lesley University, where he also teaches as part of the MFA in creative writing program.