Fig. The Human Heart

Welcome back. There are so many poems in my head that refuse to be written.

1. You're on the Esplanade when your phone vibrates in your pocket. It's your mother and her voice is transmitted shakily so you ask her if reception is poor and she says No, but there's something you should know about your father's heart. It's three days before his fifty-eighth year. Give him a call. He keeps you on the phone longer than he ever has before, says, My birthday present is being around to see it.

2. You're out to dinner. Your drink is called Absolutely Great! It is. You take another phone call in the bathroom. This time it's from your brother. There's been a second attack within eight days of the first and The numbers aren't good.

3. Eventually: quadruple bypass surgery, his entire chest cracked open, a collapsed lung, a ventilator to take all of his breaths for him, weeks in the hospital, constraints tied around his wrists, talks of a possible tracheotomy, and dropping in weight from 200 to 175.

4. Home is now a satellite hospital, but everything is getting better you're told. Each night you fall asleep imagining your chest as an active mine field or as a coastline with earthquakes shaking and fissures growing from your clavicle to your navel.

5. You've put that one song on repeat again: "I Thought You Said Summer Is Going to Take the Pain Away."

6. This is it: summer, sangria, groups of us always walking. You can categorize everything under Heart Activities, always so beautifully alive. Every day just another chance to find what makes it worth it.