1) And so it had. We can't claim any
different, whatever science tells us
in maps illuminating the body's
blue highways. Intention and the road

lead us on to destination,
or to accident, the way
a cell, restless
in its inevitable codes, multiplies,

breaks free to travel on the blood,
then sets root in lymph nodes, marrow,
brain. The seed blown
from lung or breast or bone. Nothing

we could have done. Driving
a rural highway through Soldier's summit,
where, at eight-thousand
odd feet, the canyon explodes

into sky, we enter rough country, red
cliffs curving beyond the eye—
but it won't suffice, this displacement
of grief onto landscape, however variable.

The mountains lie between us
and the vast midwest, where insensible machines
moor my husband's mother, translating
her heart's motion, the temperature

of her skin. Warning or safety. From her skull
the doctor lifts a shard curved like eggshell,
lays it by on a towel, hefts his scalpel and leans
over, to look inside.

2) In the museum, we had more
than metaphor—a comic representation,
mercy's human heart
too literal, blown up

hundreds of times larger than life—even
less believable than the jarred hearts of pigs
pickled to brazen it out
on the shelves of the high school lab.

Modeled to scale, it circulated floods
of tourists: my husband and me
and troops of girl scouts, reaching
to touch composite walls. So we learned

what we're made of—sculptural
papillary muscles, cardae tendineae
rising like trunk and branches, subterranean—
as if such a vessel could transport us

from the visceral to the aesthetic. That heart
was standardized to averages,
another commercial cavern, all too carefully lit,
though each heart beats

measures as individual
as each human face, and refuses to own
mortality. My husband kept naming parts,
the sinoatrial node "self-exciting, kindling

the impulse, setting tempo."
When William Harvey held
an eel heart in his hand, it paced, slow,
cold-blooded, toward an end

Harvey believed, with the certainty of science,
his eyes, his touch, gave meaning.

3)      An act of concentration: we will
the blips on his mother's screen

to steady, to carry her through,
while other machines perform
her body's labors. I have considered
the brain, when I thought of it,

as a tissue of ideas, the conscious self
at work to abstract the world, brutal
in its carnality. A poppy gracing its stem.
As if we were beyond such mass,

cells alive with blood, with signals
sparking our senses to move us.
As if we could leave it behind. This morning,
I peel off my gloves, drop them in the grass,

to trace, with bare right hand, bindweed
roots through the soil. My left frontal lobe
crackles, receives sense; my fingers
touch root fiber, plumped

rich with water. Whatever fragment I miss,
out of sight and mind, will grow
its own flower. The garden's excited by rain
into a tempting wilderness: lilies, foxglove opening

speckled, medical trumpets. Cure
or kill. The ancient Japanese
called the heart the realm of fire, the titular
and actual head of the body. We depend

on the brain, believe its workings
cool, deliberative—but it has little
nerve. Her surgeon can turn it
inside-out: she won't feel

a thing. It blossoms with impulse
it refuses to contain.

4)      Long-distance, the doctor tells us
about the other brain,

though the immune system attacks
antigens, while the brain
kills ideas. Composing memory, learning,
we recognize our failures, minor

falterings, domesticated murmurs
we chart on our machines, as if such knowledge
will help us. And my love is expert
in such measuring, understanding what grows

behind his mother's brow and sternum
may pull loose from her cells, pull
away in the doctor's hands, indifferent,
and that will be that. Chemicals, waves

of radiation. Kill
to cure. And then , we count
percentages, years. We send flowers
she wakes to . The doctor tests with pins

what her right hand knows; still more machines
look for buried shadows. Our dreams,
however rooted, bound by blood
and mathematics, have never prepared us

for this: science illuminating
what it won't cure. Still, what but science,
in its imaginings, could create a
heart scaled so like hers? Open

for us to stroll into, holding hands, naming
chambers more capacious even than we
desire—more so than our own—
through which human voices sing.

For Chris Johnson, and for Sherlie Baker, 1946-1993

So we joined up late—in the millennium,
in our youths, falling from us the moment
he leaned down and performed the ritual kiss,

the seal for all to see. The music started,
the piano unnerving the air. And then we drove,
though it was late already, toward Millennium—

a car packed full with champagne, honeymoon baskets,
off-white roses, their petals singed to brown,
he, his eye on the road, leaning over to kiss me—

through a night made so fierce by blizzard
we had to trust the storm's own furious flight
to carry us into the lateness, the millennial dark,

and to safety. That space we occupied
together had never seemed so small, so cold,
though I leaned into him, ready for his kiss,

under the heater's inadequate wind. We rose
into the mountains' white-out, as if scaling,
late at night, at the crisis of the millennium,

the walls of our city, set breathlessly high
in a desert silenced by that snow
leaning toward us, each flake a diagonal kiss

folding under the drifts. The city streets
turned in memory to a white, impassable maze.
It was too late. We were too far from Millennium

and such a journey to start on, such a night
to fly from our lit house into abandon.
What had we to do with ritual's kiss?

what right had we to expect our blood to spark
and fire us on our way? I touched his knee,
nostalgic already for him, the millennium,

but under my fingers sounded a single note—
terror, joy, the same low, tremulous tone
echoing through the late hour, through Millennium,
where he stopped the car and leaned to the sealing kiss.