Should Something Happen to the Heart

1
If you look right here on the graph, you can see that little
leap and then the plateau. A bee trying to cross a rural
road. The scale is staggering. He or she may put a hand up
to the chest. He or she may think he’s just out of breath
and think how odd to forget that you’d just been running
so fast.

2
If the fist quickened within and he’s holding on while
something else drowns. Actually, it’s not a single leap, but
if you look closely you’ll note an entire flight, how rash, and
now it’s a flying creature charging against the lighted window.
It’s funny what you notice and how slowly you notice
that it stops, while in the movie, someone’s life goes
on and he can surely hear you but he won’t turn around.

3
We are still not clear about the role of irregularity in the
functioning of the human heart. Whether
or a sudden shift
a slight skip;
you lie awake
an ear just over his chest, you couldn’t count
but he lives through the night anyway
and in the morning he’s fine in fact it seems
a certain chaos reigns as he shifts
in sleep or slips and then slips back here again.

4
But if the gravity of the heart could be properly computed,
which is to say, its gravitational pull on the surrounding
organs, arteries and vessels with an end to determining
finally what orbits it as a strange shadow seen when the
hand is held up to the heart as a bright light shined through
the body of the subject just before the cardiac seizure
begins, just seconds before, before the hand has had time
to crawl to the breast like a nursing animal or the fist can
slam down on the table and the splinters of glass can
release whatever the object is, it is now a flitting impression
of a figure fleeing a stifling room.

5
In other cases, the left arm begins to ache, the blood
like lead where the cry is stuck and as if struck by a
sudden thought, the gaze goes blank and she thought he
was going to say something but when he didn’t she turned
away thinking nothing of it. The octopus has three hearts.
A bee is lost on a road. It is summer and the children are
laughing and screaming on the other side of the lake but
they are hidden by the glare of the sun across the water.

6
Arhythmia that marks
but you’ll note
something locked inside the chest, running,
is almost escaping, an autonomous animal intent on
erasing though the human body cannot live
for even a moment without
and if the animal gets frightened
by loud noises, for instance shouting or crying, it may
find another home or, even homeless, refuse to return.

7
Recent studies have shown
shock; her hand up to her mouth
but she couldn’t have
I clamped my hand to my
I watched him across the room. I think I
He got farther
The base of the regulation of the heartbeat is electrical,
though it’s known that at least six different conductors
can be, must be, may very well be
often a spiral wave
breaks and falls.
A sound far off.
She touched her own
lip as a stranger might touch it if
a stranger could ever touch another like that.

8
The heart of the adult male is a pound to a pound and a
half and roughly shaped like a hand, closed and placed
heel down on a table on which a glass of wine sits refracting
the early evening light so that a wash of red covers the
hand and heads toward the wrist, rising. Once we were
alive. It happens when you’re not thinking. The breath
that holds itself, no longer asking anything of us.

9
Now we study it and it doesn’t hurt anymore. I like ink. It
stays right there. It keeps track while the body in the air
takes on some new form before it telegrams. We no longer
regard the signals as chaotic; rather we consider that their
pattern will not be repeated and he’ll go on in the new
language until we can no longer see him. He was playing
with his child out in the back of the house when the child
suddenly grew enormous and he couldn’t recall the word.
Sometimes it doesn’t hurt at all.