The Still Face Experiment 

You must have seen that Youtube clip
where a mother lets her face go dead.

Her toddler carries on burbling for twenty to thirty seconds
until she realises there is nothing coming back to her.

First it is surprise, even laughing as this must be a game
but forty seconds in and here come attempts to engage

to coax a response because this is a new kind of quiet,
one which has a hard-wired Plan B for slumping and cold blue flesh.

She makes head bobs and reaches out to touch the cheeks
and nose with strong sticky fingers, the tone

at fifty seconds is rising like a kettle, like the pressure cooker
that covered our kitchen walls with condensation and fumed.

One minute in and the pitch incrementally lifts and she is
frantic and crying and pulling at herself outside because it hurts inside

postural control is lost, she bites her own hand and this is now uncomfortable
to watch. We watch. She dissolves and stops. All she wants is this,

the relief when her mother’s face softens at two minutes fifteen
and they hug and talk and she is lifted from the interview room

into a university campus garden, in Boston in the sunny seventies
and the mother promises she will never, ever

do that again, she was simply trusting in knowledge and engaged
in the spirit of enquiry and all available research told her

just a couple of minutes would not cause lasting damage.

Graham Clifford is author of five collections of poetry. His work has been chiselled into paving slabs, translated into Romanian and German, is found on the Poetry Archive, was rejected by The New Yorker and anthologised by publishers including Faber and Broken Sleep Books. https://grahamcliffordpoetry.com/