explorium, ESPN documentary
A horse’s heart, plastic and
big as my head. Fascinating,
even after the first seven times
I held it in my arms.
How hard it worked, how much
blood it pumped, how big and heavy and
red and yellow and pink.
Plastic, smoothed with all the other
little hands just as enthralled as me.
How could something be so big?
How was I supposed to not
compare and contrast with my own?
But, today, I saw a man’s heart.
Not in a literary way, not in a nightmare way.
A man’s heart, in a bowl in an operating room,
and how it looked too wet and red
but too yellow and still to be anyting but real.
Out of his chest, replaced.
And when his heart came out—a sort of
enormous, unhappy organ—
I was nine again, then ten,
eleven or twelve. How old was I
when I last held a heart in the cradle of my arms?
Heavy and solid, unforgettable.
An enormous, unhappy kind of organ,
sleeping in that big blue bowl.
Smooth, for all the hands that held it.
