When they had done their job
of making good the air
I breathed, with a last sob
these lungs, that couldn’t bear
my weight, gave up on me;
they had emptied themselves out
of speech and secrecy,
of confidence and doubt;
now they could give no more:
silence was really death,
surface really the core;
the soul was really breath.
Hidden again from view,
this organ is at rest
from the thing it had to do
unheeded, unaddressed,
a lifetime long; no more
to work with blood and bile,
here it is deep in store
like an unconsulted file
padded with lost routine,
long past the moment now
when perhaps there might have been
some use for it, somehow.
Rewound here, and closed in,
these yards of underground
cabling can begin
to turn themselves around
one last time, and as if
they knew what they had done
digesting all that life
slowly, but by the ton,
they must, they can, give up:
just to support a man
who took, from plate and cup,
from jug, oven, or pan
all he could touch or taste,
they made from what he tried
and the small lives that died
in tens of thousands, waste.
This jar contains my heart:
when it had beaten its last,
they placed it here apart
from me, or from what passed
for me, as a special case –
unlike Egyptians, who
would keep the heart in place
beneath linen and glue
inside a corpse’s chest
to be a quickened seed
as the body rose again,
convinced these were the best
pains to have taken when,
really, there was no need.