Once Breath, and Once a Beating Heart

Once Breath, and Once a Beating Heart

for Anne

See when it unravels—the entire project

reduced to threads of moss fleeing a nor’wester;

d’you ever imagine chasing just one strand, letting it lead you

to an unsung cleft in a rock, a place you could take it to,

dig yourself in—but what are the chances of that?

                                                                                                Materials

                                                                                                Kathleen Jamie

We’d brought the kids to see and to walk through

the mirror maze, and they went on

and through five or six times before I set down

one step, no three, no six feet depending

on the reflection.  I think: there’s only one way

out.  But I’m caught looking and I watch

the crowd negotiate the open spaces like the blind

do in an unfamiliar room.  I made it through

by depending on the glass places that stood around me

all smudged with the grub of fingerprints,

at my knees mostly, though some a little taller, some

the stuff of lips maybe and a cheek, how I bet two

teenagers would, hand in hand, have negotiated

the maze and quick who’s looking? selfied

themselves in a kiss and turned quick into the mirror

and laughed and made it, dancing, though

no one told them, in the precise pattern of the Golden

Ratio: paused and caught and always moving on.

I’d spent some of the ride down to Boston talking

to a good friend about wanting to find out

where Eleanor Roosevelt was the summer of 1936

when by twos and threes, twelve children drowned

in my hometown.  I have the feeling she’d’ve known

about it, the locals hushed and whispered cheek to ear and too

quiet when she arrived on the island.  How the news

would’ve spread like breath, or like veins going

into the heart and the blood, of course all of that

blood, and, drowning, stopped maybe not all at once,

but soon enough to resist a pump.  One boy died, his

death certificate said, of “acute dilation of the heart”

and he looked like a napping child in his bed, the kerosene

lamp lighting his face at the wake, the deep shadow

of the day pinned under the coffin and his mother sitting,

maybe saying she’d chased all the ghosts away

and waited with him till day.  And if Eleanor had known,

wouldn’t she have sat with her waiting too, and looking

at the lost child the same way, and thinking of her own

Franklin Jr., died in infancy…                       and ask… I wandered

through exhibit after exhibit with this and she the First

Lady and reflecting on it all, I almost didn’t see

two things, hidden, it seems, behind displays

and bobbing heads of the crowd: the iron lung

and, several steps a woman lifting the actual heart and lungs

and short windpipe (she says to a mother and son) of a pig. 

And while I’m thinking FDR and polio and iron lung

and consumption Anne the scientist is standing explaining how air

and blood move into the muscle and she shows me now

how (the heart had been scalpel-cut and was thicker

through on one side) the blood would move into it

so efficient if it worked right, and the flat surface

of the lungs (patient as any corpse) waited for her to pump

and up they’d come and I wondered aloud to Anne: what

would you prefer, considering you needed a new

heart?  The heart of a pig (because there have been

significant advancements and treatments, especially,

she explains, in rejection drugs) or the heart

of a criminal?  I think if I needed someone else’s

lungs inside of me, and their heart too, I say, I’d choose

the pig instead.  I wouldn’t want a criminal beating

and breathing for me, a murderer say, or a serial

rapist, I mean I think it matters, and for what I know

of pigs, which is almost nothing yet, I know about sadists

and cruelty and I wouldn’t want the orchestra of their breath

directed at instrumental speed within me.  Listen,

for me, maybe even a stint in that tube of iron lung,

lying prostrate for hours and hours would do, looking up into

a mirror (was that so you or they could see your breath as it

blurred your face and be calmed while this machine, what resembles

an early aqua-lung or the deep divers in the diving bell—

how—glory! it all depends on the pressure

on the breath and the blood and your being alive.  I’m wondering still,

after Anne lets me touch the inflated lung (I’ve got

my hand in a sandwich bag of all things) she leads me

deep inside precisely past the stiff cut to show

the venous entry, the profound secret, strings I could

pluck like a harp or guitar, and yes wondering still about FDR

and more, Eleanor, and if when she took in the news

about the fourteen (the twelve in one go, one boat

the other two three weeks later) she touched

her throat and chest at the same time, if she was

holding one of those rose-patterned tea cups I saw once

in an exhibit, and drank King Cole tea from, how it was

warm and strong and went down slow, past her

beating heart, her breathing lungs, pausing to nod

at her heart only when…but no, not pausing or not long enough

to notice anyway, intact as they are, protected, in the cage.