During the heart attack,
the young man became younger,

doctors’ urgent voices hushed,
a strange lullaby of beeps and hums

soothing the room, which was really just
the inside walls of his mother as,

a fetus now, he summersaulted through
before and after in the amniotic space

of forever—or as close as memory comes
to shadows and light swelling

past that room of steel and machines
into some other space of life-ever-after,

this small opaque tadpole twirling, then
suddenly reversing and rising

through seconds, moments, weeks,
months, swirling air bubbles filled with years

all ascending to a solitary nurse calling, Stay
with us. Stay.