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.
