Heart (2).

Heart (2)

The heart is an old man mouthing obscenities.
Muttering, muttering.
On the echo monitor each beat becomes
an aurora borealis, and the valve
flaps like the top of an old cartoon stovepipe.
You house these tunnels--
put your dark head down and enter.
Now the rhythm's colorized, vivid
like weather on the 6 o'clock news:
the front moves, flashes, subsides.
You have been vigilant.
On the sonogram the child-heart was
a little cricket muscle. Did you guess
hearts grow pitiless or monstrous
in such grainy, uncanny mineshafts as this?