Nancy Botkin
The Fever
August is raging,
raging.
The fires in the west cannot be contained.
We swiped the newfangled
thermometer across our
grandson’s forehead.
It read 102 degrees at one AM.
Up again at four, he seemed surprised
by the darkness. Unfazed by the fever,
he wanted to go look at the moon.
My husband took him downstairs
to the front window,
but they couldn’t find it.
Gone, that innocent moon,
that crackling white-hot
face that waxes and wanes.
Underneath the unseen moon is the all-night
dream-state
where I’m half-awake, half-floating
on some make-shift raft or diving toward earth like
the tip of a firework.
We all landed back in bed, heads on pillows,
and soon blue morning struck its match.
The birds started obeying
an ancient command: chirp feverishly.
Time Sensitive
Here it is: the heart weighs, roughly, eleven ounces.
Which is why on a calm summer night,
alone with the stars, you can’t hear it beat, even
when you tip your chin toward your chest,
just as the earth tilts when making a slight
adjustment at the solstice. You’re more likely
to feel a pulsing in your ears. When people have
told me that their lives were imploding,
their stories have to do with the heart—the failed
marriage, the foreclosure, the forensic
evidence—their faces closing down like dying
flowers. I kick the dust off my shoes
here in Indiana, what we call the heartland, one
of the center states that seems essential
to the country’s survival. There’s something sturdy
in our pipes and valves that’s critical
to the health of Selma and Sacramento. Yet,
if you say you’re from Indiana they wonder
what you’re doing living among the cows
and the endless ribbons of road. I read
that a plane had to turn around and go back
to the airport to retrieve a human heart,
precious cargo that didn’t transfer, the recipient
waiting in another state. Now we're
getting to the heart of the matter, we say in anger,
when the cold nugget of truth is sitting
there exposed, and today it was the hospital
personnel in their white jackets,
shifting their feet, blood rushing in their ears,
as the plane glided onto the tarmac.
You can’t undo the problem of the body,
but you can put a heart in a container,
carry it by its handle, and walk as fast as you can
to a person whose chest has been cracked
open without skipping a beat. Few will ever hold
a human heart, but no one can look
at the cosmos without one, or a dilapidated barn
in a blue-air sunset, or a fallow cornfield
covered with frost. For a minute on that cold
table, the patient had no heart at all. True
or false? We are heartsick when we are without.