The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart
Margaret Atwood
I do not mean the symbol of love, a candy shape to decorate cakes with, the heart that is supposed to belong or break;
I mean this lump of muscle that contracts like a flayed biceps, purple-blue, with its skin of suet, its skin of gristle, this isolate, this caved hermit, unshelled turtle, this one lungful of blood, no happy plateful.
All hearts float in their own deep oceans of no light, wetblack and glimmering, their four mouths gulping like fish. Hearts are said to pound: this is to be expected, the heart’s regular struggle against being drowned.
But most hearts say, I want, I want, I want, I want. My heart is more duplicitous, though to twin as I once thought. It says, I want, I don’t want, I want, and then a pause. It forces me to listen,
and at night it is the infra-red third eye that remains open while the other two are sleeping but refuses to say what it has seen.
It is a constant pestering in my ears, a caught moth, limping drum, a child’s fist beating itself against the bedsprings: I want, I don’t want. How can one live with such a heart?
Long ago I gave up singing to it, it will never be satisfied or lulled. One night I will say to it: Heart, be still, and it will.
~From Selected Poems II (1976-1986) by Margaret Atwood, 1987.
