Transplant

After the surgeon digs 
the dying heart 
out of our patient’s chest,

he places it in a steel bowl
on the back table. 

I lift the heart out of the bowl,
rest it in my cupped palms, 
feeling the same way I feel
when I hold a newborn baby,
realizing it was just alive
inside another’s body. 

I am dumb and humbled—
all of the metaphors 
now so obvious:

The human heart 
is the poem.

This organ
is what the whole of life 
is trying to say—

that in sickness 
we enlarge and harden, 
that the strongest of us 
somehow remain
soft and supple—
pliable cores of
muscle and spark,
moving to an impulse 
apart from logic.

We unwrap the donor heart 
from the cooler of ice, 
just flown in
from another state, 
once housed by a man
who took his life
with a gunshot to the head. 

The surgeon inspects 
the new heart’s anatomy, 
sews it into the
carved-out cavity
of our patient’s body. 

When the cross-clamp is removed,
when the blood begins to flow,
the new heart beats again
in a body other than its own, 

without a prompt,
without a shock, 
without a word or whisper. 

The surgeon looks up 
from his work, says,  

“Well, if this doesn’t just amaze you, 
you might as well be dead.”