Echocardiogram

We must take their word for it.
That pulsing blizzard on the screen
is your heart. Doors opening,
closing, opening. I think I see
a small snowy figure applauding us—
for getting this far, perhaps.

And we are far. School’s out.
Here, in a dim hospital room,
you lie on a gurney
and I perch on an unforgiving chair.

We smile across the technician’s
smug shoulders. I realize my
right hand is pressed to my
own heart, and that there are
tears behind these tired eyes.

You don’t know where my head,
my heart are. Yes, yes. I eclipse
myself again. Heart disappearing
in the shadow of my passing mind.
I must think. I have sent my own
heart to its room for a nap.

But yours. I know it by heart,
always did. To see it on a
screen, two technicians telling
me they know better, that it
would take physics to understand
these chambers, these valves?

So very literal, these medical souls.
Flashes of red, orange, blue blood—
no rhyme or reason? Treason.

I know but I do not tell
them that I am blessed to know
this heart in a way that they
never will. I love that heart.
I do not always understand it,
but I know it. I come when it
calls. I call for it, and it comes.

Meanwhile, somewhere else
in this world of physics and
flashing blood, a person I have
never met despises my heart—
her conduit, too, a simple screen.
We forget that screens hide
more than they show.

She chooses anger, defined and ugly,
and takes the time to translate it
into keystrokes. She believes she
knows. No one will take that from
her, no one.

In the end, the anger sustains us
no longer than the loving. To bless
or to curse? To resurrect or to slay?
Ashes to ashes. Soon enough, we are
done with this silliness and in
the ground.

Your heart is still beating, in you
and in me. Her heart is full of what
was not, what should have been.
It is still beating, somewhere, as
cruel words take shape in her hands.

Yet: Somewhere, someone loves that
heart as I love yours.

I refuse to curse this.
I refuse to damn this.
I acknowledge what I do not know.

We create more pain,
all of us, when we refuse
to let go of what was and
what was not.

Enough.
You, dear you. We wait. You and I
wait to hear about your test,
how your heart measures
up in the world of valves and ventricles.

I measure your heart in road trips and
peanut-butter-banana smoothies and
pure love and the humility of not knowing.

I measure my own heart in the words
that do not exist, in all that will
never appear on a screen to be judged.

Through the screen
there are simply echoes.
Come, let us leave this place.
I hear they’re serving breakfast
two streets over.