Margaret Atwood
I do not mean the symbol
of love, a candy shape
to decorate cakes with,
the heart that is supposed
to belong or break;
I mean this lump of muscle
that contracts like a flayed biceps,
purple-blue, with its skin of suet,
its skin of gristle, this isolate,
this caved hermit, unshelled
turtle, this one lungful of blood,
no happy plateful.
All hearts float in their own
deep oceans of no light,
wetblack and glimmering,
their four mouths gulping like fish.
Hearts are said to pound:
this is to be expected, the heart’s
regular struggle against being drowned.
But most hearts say, I want, I want,
I want, I want. My heart
is more duplicitous,
though to twin as I once thought.
It says, I want, I don’t want, I
want, and then a pause.
It forces me to listen,
and at night it is the infra-red
third eye that remains open
while the other two are sleeping
but refuses to say what it has seen.
It is a constant pestering
in my ears, a caught moth, limping drum,
a child’s fist beating
itself against the bedsprings:
I want, I don’t want.
How can one live with such a heart?
Long ago I gave up singing
to it, it will never be satisfied or lulled.
One night I will say to it:
Heart, be still,
and it will.
It never ceases to amaze me when an author can put themselves so directly into the psyche of anyone who reads their material. That's what Margaret Atwood did in this piece. Ah, the duplicitous heart...how well we are acquainted. Especially as of late I have felt it tugging at itself, longing to burst through its metaphorical restraints. And it is confusing and upsetting, frustrating and paralyzing. The last adjective might seem mildly dramatic, but I assure you- it's not. When you are trying to make tough decisions or decipher a situation you need your heart to be on your side. It's the one thing you should always be able to count on. If it doesn't even know what it wants, how in the worldl am I supposed to figure it out? You have no idea what to do, and that, my friends, is paralyzing. It makes you want to repremand it, like a child wailing about on the floor: "You know better than to act this way. Now, get up and pull yourself together. Don't make me have to tell you again." And I would say that to it...if a heart actually listened and I wouldn't look like a paranoid schizophrenic who'd gone off their meds.
But, you can't make your heart listen. It's just a muscle. But, a heart can be conditioned. It can be trained and taught to do what you want it to do, both physically and emotionally. I've said it before and I'll say it again- I'm a big believer in choosing to be happy. Your heart might be breaking, splitting into fragments of its former self and you might be too. You can either lie there on the floor, content to let the pain slowly erase you, or you can stand up and begin a new chapter. You can smile. You can dance. You can sing. You can create. You can breathe. You can laugh. You can dream. You can begin again. Do you understand? You can begin again. One of the most important things to understand about hearts is this: you must know when to condition and when to just close your eyes, suck it up, and listen. A heart doesn't always say what we want to hear, but somtimes it says the one thing we truly need to know.
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