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The One Thing
By Samuel Wharton
Here’s the one thing
about the heart:
when it’s working
properly, forget
the thousand small machines
of the body.
All artifice they seem,
before this engine that stop-
motions the world. Pound
and pound again,
by its blood-red hands
time is put askew–
like a thing that never ends,
because it never begins.
Look outside. Or walk
down the city street.
Sight and sound don’t strike
the same stilted way: instead,
stented and stippled,
people, cars and buildings
float on heated air
(surely a sign there is another
world very near to us,
revealed the way dark
is peeled back
by a candle).Your disquiet
has a person in it,
as Frank O’Hara said,
though that person
is not hunting nor hunted,
but haunting your darkened
chambers, impatient
for beginning. When working
properly, your heart
cannot fail you.
If you falter, it will remind you—
not to love is impossible,
like erasing the sign of the sun
from the moon’s marquee.
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