I turn off the switch to your heart. Your heart goes out, with no glowing. Your heart, your heart. I have a special blinder, a piece of fine lead for your heart. I have a parasol and sunglasses for your heart. A special myopia developed over years of staring — years of squinting into mirrors searching for beauty. Now I can’t see your heart. O blow it up, my loved one, swell it up and over till it’s everywhere.
Your heart is squeezed into the corner. It is under the bed. Always scurrying from vision. Your fugitive heart. Silent, obvious. Your huge heart, red and sore. Your angry heart, sick of being silent and invisible. Your heart needs a shake-up. If you redo your heart, then, when it is huge and stuck on a chair weeping, perhaps I will see it. Take off the blinders to your heart. Get your heart out of its scared shell. I want to see your heart. Please send me your heart. Let’s strip your heart.
When she is angry she throws her heart in the bath. Huge and wooden it just sits there floating, cracking, and splintering. I open the door and say, “Are you all right?” I go over and kiss her heart, burning my lips, forgetting the great heat of her heart. The heart just floats in the bath. I can hear it hissing. Push the heart under — it comes to the surface. I say sorry to her heart. Next, she puts her heart up on a pole in the living room. She walks around looking sullen, doing the dishes. “What’s wrong?” I ask her. “Nothing,” she answers, but the heart swells and lets out a huge crack on top of the pole. I quietly take the heart down from the pole, open the windows and get sunshine on her heart. She is still in the kitchen doing the dishes. Becoming cruel, I put her heart down with the pots and pans and leave her in there, furiously weeping and scrubbing, the heart still beating in the leftover soup. Finally I take her to bed and curl around her heart. I curl around it like a foetus. I curl around it till it is as big as a boulder and I am like a tiny leech, a tiny worm in her heart. I curl around it under the covers until she comes to bed for it. She slips in beside me, deathly cold, her feet like stones, and then in the darkness I open her ribs and slip it in. It will only work for a while — enough for a little peace to make her warm. I put her heart back in behind her breast and I rub her till it is beating madly. I rub her till her heart is stoked and then when it goes off, I go to sleep. In the morning her heart is breaking through again. She takes it with her to work. She keeps it in a purse, in a bell and some cups. In the morning her heart is small and efficient. It is rolled up in leaves and left for the children, left for the winds and workers till she returns. Her heart. Her beautiful heart.