Sweet, Your Heart

 

 

Sweet, your heart, that clenches,
that pressurizes the systole of it all,
the hydraulic purpose of your life,
the thrumming foundation of your
most basic rhythm, its quenching
shushings, its whump-a-whump
rappings against the rib-slatted
confines of your thorax. The way
the flesh of you damps those
pulsations, the way the tangle
of blood vessel branchings ramble
their way through you, the ramrod
peaks that balloon your arterial
walls only to dissipate into capillary
whispers, the curious contortions
of your erythrocytes, the way they
swell their dimpled way to the nether
network where artery fingertips
stretch and reach for those of veins,
where hemoglobin offers oxygen
to hungering cells. From the pumping
thumping engine room of your chest
to the soft, insistent tap tappata tap
tappata tap at your wrist, your temple,
the blue roadways of heart messages
mapped onto the parchment world
of your skin, you, sweet, your heart.

 

 

Retired aeronautical engineer Roy Beckemeyer studies Paleozoic insect fossils. He also writes poems: they have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. His poetry collection, “Music I Once Could Dance To” (Coal City Press, 2014), was a 2015 Kansas Notable Book, and he was a 2016 Pushcart nominee.