Blood circulates like a chain letter sent from address to address, returning again to its sender, rewritten, resent. Stuttered correspondence. All this hidden within me. 

Procedure: intravenous by route. Findings: Normal motion, irregular rhythm.

A chest of drawers. A veritable organ of the secret psychological life. Enclosure, concealment: cabinets have that quality of intimacy. 

A bird’s nest: how many times in my garden have I experienced the disappointment of discovering a nest too late. In November, after the fledglings have left. 

A mourning dove sits for days in her wicker and thatch. Her entire body compels her to stay. Out of respect for her otherness, I won’t call it love. Intimacy: yes.

My chest nests my heart. Ribs made of twigs, muscle of string. From the ground, I hear inconstant percussion. I see nothing. I guess at motion. 

A five drawer chest. A small child. At the back of a middle drawer he nestles the thing he’s secreted into the house, where no mother or father will find it, a nest, its small white twigs, its intimate emptiness. 

Clothes worn closest to the skin are folded. They rest in drawers next to the bed. Outer clothes hang in the closet across the room. 

Those furthest from my body—jackets, raincoats — hang from mudroom pegs downstairs. By the time the front door opens, I am wholly other.

As a child, my heart is the size of my fist. As an adult, two fists. There is room for anything I secret. 

The false bottom of a small box. The back corner of a middle drawer. The back corner of an unlit shelf. Unexpected shadow. Crooked rhythm.

Birds fly overhead, over their old nests. Do they remember these assemblages as homes. Do they have maps to the place before flight, to the twigs and the bare down of their blind hunger. Their hearts beat faster than mine. Their blood perfuses their bodies. Their ten thousand bodies perfuse the sky. Normal perfusion. 

The nest floor is a false bottom, a lattice cabinetry sutured loose by beak and claw. Below, a flightless fall. The floor of a nest is a secret a child, still without feathers, is not allowed to unlock. 

A chest with a false bottom is a veritable organ of the secret psychological life. Dovetailed, snug, one fist as child, two as adult. Room to hide secrets. 

The nest observed late in the season. Empty. Do they get out alive. Are they here, now, full grown floating above morning. Their contained hearts. Sounding. Beating. 

Normal motion. Irregular rhythm. Flight.