Constance Studer
Heart Shift
We've got to stop meeting like this,
Paul quips the third time he's kicked out of heaven,
wakes up to see paddles in my hands. Idiopath,
his doctor writes on his chart,
doesn't know why Paul's heart keeps quitting,
disease without recognizable cause,
origin unknown,
but just walking into his room
I know. The way a composer
looks at a sheet of music and hears a dirge.
Too much pain, he whispers,
his body a camera set at the widest aperture,
sensitive to the tiniest light,
his mouth a white line in a long lived-in face
ten miles down a bumpy mountain road.
Nothing you say can shock me, ever the jester
Paul is on mortal notice unless another heart
can be found. I've had every test
except autopsy . . . that's where I draw the line.
Sunlight will take longer to circle his body
as it lingers over his face in the mirror.
Blood will fade to thin ink
writing his signature on the dotted line,
leaving his children fixed for life without him.
Each breath an act of rebellion,
he relearns every day
how to live in his wrists,
the arch of his foot,
the third intercostal space,
in his jawbone and eye sockets,
how to retrieve voice and hope
from defibrillator paddles and call lights,
the shiver of leaves.
Constance Studer, a graduate of Toledo Hospital School of Nursing, worked in Intensive Care-Coronary Care and then as a hospital supervisor. She has an M.A. in creative writing from the University of Colorado.
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