USA

STANDING AROUND THE HEART

We stood, in health class, around the cow's heart
Miss Hutchings unwrapped on her desk.  Inside
And out, she said, we need to know ourselves,
Halving that heart to show us auricles,
Ventricles, valves, the wall well-built or else.
Her fingers found where arteries begin.
She pressed the ends of veins.  Richard Turner,
Whose father's heart had halted, examined
His hands.  Anne Cole, whose father had revived
To cut hair at the mall, stepped back, turning
From the entry to the steer's aorta,
The four chambers we were required to know.
While we watched, Miss Hutchings unwrapped the hearts
Of chickens and turkeys, the hearts of swine
And sheep, arranged them by size on the thick,
Brown sack, leaving a space, we knew, for ours.
We took our pulses.  We listened by way
Of her stethoscopes, to each other, boy
To boy, girl to girl, because of the chance
We'd touch.  Those butcher hearts warmed while I dreamed
Of pressing my ear to the rhythmic heart
Of Stephanie Romig, whose breasts, so far,
Had brushed me one time while dancing.  And then
Miss Hutchings recited the quart total
Of our blood, the distance it must travel,
Leaving and returning, all of the names
For the necessary routes it followed,
Ending with capillaries so close
To the surface, we could nearly reach them
With our lips and tongues, rushing the blood to
Each of the sensitive sources for joy.

THE ETERNAL LANGUAGE OF THE HANDS

The surgeon Celsus, at the time of Christ,
Said the right hand should operate
On the left eye, the left hand should invade
The right.  He meant the interns to practice
From the weak side like switch hitters,
An old strategy which makes us smile,
But the smug health of the moment
Turns a page in the book of longing: 
I looked left, then right, at the pictures
My father showed me: the husband, the wife,
Through five generations which ended
In German scrawled unintelligibly
Across the back.  I was young enough
To believe, because he had lived
With grandparents who spoke privately
In German, he would translate the three pairs
Born somewhere other than Pittsburgh.
I expected a second language to
Enter me like the left-handed layup
I practiced each day, but he said German
Was forbidden like taking the Lord's name
In vain, that he'd shaken off Kraut and Hun
And Heine, slurs I'd never hear because
We'd changed.  He might as well have tried,
Like some, swallowing a child's raw heart
For beauty and love.  Consider
How many cataracts Celsus removed,
Inserting his needles, nudging them
Off-center like wind-blown grit.  Left, then
Right-handed, thousands of years before
The surgeries we wait for.  My father
The baker rolled sandwich buns with both hands
At once, circles so tight you couldn't tell
Which had been formed from the left or right.
Like Celsus removing  clouds and teaching
Those miracles to disciples
In the eternal language of the hands. 

THE USES OF RAIN

We sat, in geography, for nine weeks
With water, a marking period of rain.
We followed the dittoed diagrams
Of water's efficient recycling--
Precipitation, evaporation,
All the clouds we memorized for exams:
Cirrus, cumulus, the great thunderheads
Like the ones Mr. Sanderson called us
To watch at the windows.  Snow, he told us,
Was nature's cheap ice cream, more air in drifts
Than water.  A barometer, he said,
Could thrive inside an injured knee.  But he
Made us read the names for irrigation,
How crop rotation and the geometry
Of plowing could safety-net the earth.
He taught the proper times for lawn sprinklers,
The folly of building in the flood plain,
And we remembered the time tables
For tides, the value of delta, wetlands,
And the extraordinary ecosystem
Of the ocean.  And though we conserved
For extra credit, though we catalogued
Our care, we took our test, turned it in,
And listened, books closed, to Mr. Sanderson
Tell us the story of the crested bustard,
Whose desire is triggered by the sound of rain.
"Because it lives in the desert," he explained,
"Its courtship dance must be timed just right."
He held our stack of tests to his chest
And walked among our rows.  "In zoos," he said,
"In captivity, those birds begin to dance
When they hear a keeper's hose.  They prance
To the simple sound of cleaning, believing
That rain will water the luck of their children."

SWEET THINGS

All the way through doughnuts I sang along
With the radio because they were the last
Sweet things I laid my hands on before my shift
Was over.  My father was busy with icing,
Blending color with different degrees of sugar,
And then he had an hour of pastries to fill
With custard and fruit to compete with the rolls
On television which cakewalked to the oven.
In the bakery, time raised bread and browned it.
Time hand-rolled sandwich buns, carried pies
And coffee cakes to cool on countertops,
None of them strutting off their pans after
I stepped into snow, inhaling with the joy
I thought I'd earned before dawn, driving
The station wagon four miles to where
My mother was drinking sugared coffee
And eating zwieback she'd brought home stale
The night before.  I heard news, weather,
And the drive-time deejay say Bobby Vee,
Connie Francis, or some sound-alike
For success because it was time for
The reasonable world to test itself.
And I left that car on the plowed street
So I could say the hell with shoveling
Our driveway with the snow still falling,
Exhaling with my mother before she closed
The door on the Chevy still warm and steered
It back to the bakery in the changing light
To sell to men finishing one shift
Or starting another at the mill,
Each carrying a bag of sweet things
Into the ordinary ends of morning. 

IN FILMS, THE ARMY ANTS ARE ALWAYS INTELLIGENT

Water and fire again, we think, watching
Natives dig a trench, lug the gasoline
To its banks.  It's the white man's solution,
Some land owner protecting investments,
All those years of cheap labor just lately
Paying off.  Ants, after all, are ants, but
Understandably, he's a bit nervous
When his workers chant, fumble with magic
In a pouch.  Savages, he's learned, always
Sense when the absentee gods should be called.
 

And we might wonder, while the cameras pan
The rain forest for troops, if these things rest,
If there's a day along the Amazon
When you could sleep off hard work or a drunk
In safety.  And why there's still a jungle;
And why these ants, a million years of them,
Haven't eaten every square inch of green.
There's never a natural predator;

There's only the good sense of travel north
So climate can negotiate with them.
 

All we're taught, at last, are the miles of them,
That their sign language ripples front to back,
Reaching the billionth soldier correctly.
Remember that schoolroom game, the one where
Miss Harshman whispered a message into
Janey's ear?  She turned and whispered those words
To Billy who whispered to Sally and
Thirty seats later you recited them
To laughter that blossomed from the first row?
 

Think of yourself as sluggard in the rear.
For days you've had nothing to eat, the ground
You're covering stripped clean ten thousand ranks
Before you.  Well, somebody has to starve,
You might conclude, improvisational
In the tropics.  But then you feel the word,
Sense plantation, panic, picnic for all.
So there's sacrifice ahead; there's something
To those parables, you see, when your turn
Finally comes: The early waves were burnt;
The first leaf rafts were sunk; and you're certain,
Dancing before battle, that the water
And fire are gone, that the natives have fled
Or been shot in the back by the owner.
So he's on his own now, self-destructive,
Or maybe he has dynamite, something
Apocalyptic.  On the other side
Of the moat there is feasting.  All you have
To do is cross, stepping from one body
To another, to cultivated land.

 

All poems are from Standing around the Heart,
Univ. of Arkansas Press, 2005, ISBN 1 55728 786 4

© All Copyright, Gary Fincke.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.