from Old & New Testaments (1995)
An occasional turbulence of the heart—
of no consequence, said the first doctor who heard it,
listening, eyes closed, like a god to a conch.
But the doctor I visit for a sore throat
is less sanguine: You could drop dead tomorrow.
He sends me right over to a specialist.
The specialist sits beside me on the narrow bed
and asks about my family.
I tell him of my mother's murmur,
and how my father's father, sick with pneumonia,
slumped as his wife rubbed his head.
I turn away, stretch out on my side, open my shirt.
He circles his arm round my chest, and with cold steel
he roots for my heart.
His electronics amplify the sound of an earnest
washing machine, not the African drum
of the heart I walked through as a child
at the Museum of Science and Industry,
a maze of plush vestibules I lingered in, peering
down the corridors of blood.
And, supposedly, my mother's real mother
died young, I add. “She grieved herself to death.”
His eyes stay fixed on the craggy sierra
my heart is etching on the screen: Hold still.
I stiffen, stare at the smooth, green, cement block wall.
Its best not to hold a baby you must give away, her
doctor must have said, wrapping it quickly in a white blanket—
though later the nurse brought her a wet, black lock.
Down the hall she could hear a baby crying, crying.
In her own room the radiator ticked its heat
like a trapped cicada.
A slight prolapse,
a valve that lets the blood seep
a little backwards, he says, measuring peak
and ravine, calculating volume per second.
Perfectly innocent.
You can button up your blouse.
Back home, I lift my daughter's shirt and press
my ear to her chest, her pale nipples
small as chamomile—until she giggles.
No murmur, the doctor said when she was born.
No murmur, no murmur, I repeat above her,
her little heart churning out its clear lub
dubs, her valves snapping shut
without a whisper back.
For weeks I browse encyclopedias, unearth old
anatomy texts, then decide to visit
the Philadelphia copy of The Heart.
Inside the Institute, I coax my daughter past
the spinning discs of Optical Illusion,
the button-ready syntheses of Sound.
We round a corner and, just as I've promised,
it's there: tall as our house, a winter clutch
of blue ivy snaking the smooth outside, God's
fist inside pounding the table…
Too scary, she cries, clinging to me—
then runs out for comfort toward
the birth of tornados,
the measurement of earthquakes.