poetry wednesday : just a body whose heart’s still beating, a morsel.
Full Dark
by Molly Fisk
Tonight, inside my body, the blood races through veins,
passing in its circuit a piece of chicken wire. Calling it something
homely gives me all the power over the stent I’m ever going to have:
thus does woman return to Eden and name the world. But tonight,
I’m not a woman, just a body whose heart’s still beating.
I could be elk, frog, house cat, spawning salmon. A raptor
sailing above its next morsel. I could be the morsel.
My friend whose chest was cracked years ago is still astonished
that you can’t feel anything with your heart. There’s no sensation,
only the blind clenching and unclenching.
I’ll tell you what scares me most: how fast it beats.
Tonight, the last birds scatter goodbyes across the lawn.
The sky’s that nearly sherbet color I can’t match with paint.
Life is full of minor disappointments. Failures of skill, failures of wit,
of luck. That the heart can’t feel a thing is pretty funny —
love being only in our minds, after all. Tonight, the light will drain
from air the way it always does and then the blue hour descend
and then full dark. I’m still as brave as I was before the careful
insertion of chicken wire: not more, not less. Probably,
like my father, and his father — with or without salt, soy, butter,
egg yolks, exercise, and wonder — I will live as long as I live.
Not a moment longer.
Molly Fisk sent me this poem a few days ago, and of course since as of last Monday, I now have my own stent, my own chicken wire, it had a deeper meaning than I could have imagined otherwise, a more deeply felt meaning, an embodied, hot meaning. A meaning that comes with recognition. Thank you, Molly, for sending these words to me. Indeed, we will all live as long as we live, and can only hope that our living up to that moment has been filled up with what we love.
Molly Fisk writes poetry and essays in the foothills of Northern California, where she’s also a life coach, a radio commentator, and a writing teacher (poetrybootcamp.com) “Full Dark” is from her second book The More Difficult Beauty, available at http://www.thebookseller.biz/
