THE TEACHER

Hilarie jones

I was twenty-six the first time I held

A human heart in my hand

It was sixty-four and heavier than I expected,

Its chambers slack;

And I was stupidly surprised

At how cold it was

It was the middle of the third week

Before I could look at her face,

Before I could spend more than an hour

Learning the secrets of cirrhosis

The dark truth of diabetes, the black lungs

Of the Marlboro women, the exquisite

Painful shape of kidney stones,

Without eating an entire box of Altoids

To smother the smell of formaldehyde

After seeing her face, I could not help

But wonder if she had a favorite color

If she hated beets,

Or loved country music before her hearing

Faded, or learned to read

Before cataracts placed her in perpetual

Twilight.

I wondered if her mother had once been happy

When she’d come home from school

Or if she’d ever had a valentine from a secret

Admirer

In the weeks thet followed, I would

Drive the highways, scanning billboards,

I would see her face, her eyes

Squinting aways the cigarette smoke

Or she would turn up at the bus stop

Pushing a grocery cart of empty

Beer cans and soda bottles, I wondered

If that was how she’d paid for all those smokes

Or if the scars of repeated infections in her womb

Spoke to a more universal currency.

Dis she die, I wondered, in a cardboard box

Under the burnside Bridge, nursing a bottle

Of strawberry wine, telling herself

She felt a little warmer now,

Or in the Good Faith Shelter,

Her few belongings safe under the sheet

Held to her faltering heart:

Or in the emergency room, lying

On a wheeled gurney, the pitiless

Lights above, the guazy curtains around?

Did she ever wonder what it all was for?

I wash I could have told her in those days

What I’ve now come to know: that

It was for this—the baring

Of her body on the stainless steel table—

That I might come to know its secrets

And, knowing them, might listen

To the machine-shop hum of aortic stenosis

In an old woman’s chest, smile a little to myself

And, in gratitude to her who taught me,

Put away my stethoscope, turn to my patient

And say lets’s talk about your heart.