My Heart Draws a Rough Map —— Howie Good —— Blue Hour Press 2009
B lu e H o u r P r es s 1709 8 t h S t T u s ca l o o s a , AL 3 5 4 0 1 www.bluehourpress.com editor@bluehourpress.com Š 2009 Howie Good. All rights reserved. Artwork by Mia Christopher. All rights reserved. www.miachristopher.com.
Parts of My Heart Draws a Rough Map were previously published, often in somewhat different form, in Fogged Clarity, Houston Literary Review, Leaf Garden Press, Shoots & Vines, Outside Writers, Prick of the Spindle, Muton, Kill Author, Callused Hands, and Full of Crow.
1
—— “Tickets!” the conductor shouts. My heart is riding the train into the city. It glances out the window at the river that knuckles alongside the tracks. The river was once a great commercial highway. Today it’s only scenery. At least the seats on the train face forward. Traveling backwards always makes my heart feel sick.
2
—— My mother reclined while attached to the tubes—someone said the same kind of tubes as used in V-2 rockets and Messerschmitts. Radiant isotopes circulated through her. I visited when I could. There were so many causes for alarm in those days, so many passers-by with underlying conditions. On the corner behind a spike fence was the Church of the Firstborn whose adherents believed God loved them. My heart knew the truth, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. It was like my heart was a window, and the window was open, and rain blew in.
3
—— It’s perfect bombing weather. Angels are continually taking off and landing in the big, empty field next door. “Love is the world’s greatest democracy,” my heart declaims above the rumble of air traffic. Later, when I repeat it to B. in bed, she doesn’t argue or object. My heart shakes hands with her heart.
4
—— I had bad teeth in the dream, just as in real life, but in the dream I had the long, droopy moustache of a gunfighter to disguise it. I walked so slowly up the tree-lined street I appeared lost. People had stopped mowing their lawns or playing with their dogs to watch me. A few even pointed. Perhaps they were wondering like me what was in the grocery bag I was carrying that the bottom had turned a greasy black, my heart or someone else’s.
5
—— “Next, please,” the barber says. My heart trots in from the outfield, chewing a handful of sunflower seeds. The barber is holding what looks like a letter, but if it’s a letter, it’s not the letter on blue paper the government says I need. I fight down the confusing feeling of drowning and then talk about last night’s dream. Women with half-smiles finger the fabric noncommittally.
6
—— My heart climbs onto the roof. From up there, it can see the system of roads built to carry away the dead. I beg my heart to come down. “You’re going to get hurt,” I warn. My heart doesn’t answer. It’s thinking of its obligation to beat. It’s thinking of the dead on their backs in boxes. It’s thinking of my mother, the unrequited bones of her face.
7
—— I hear crying. The crying goes on all night. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was a baby crying, it sounds so human in the dark. My heart tries to sleep, but can’t. I watch it walk away. I watch for a long time. I watch my heart until it’s out of sight. It never looks back. It doesn’t wave. And then the street fills with bruised shoes and the invention of gunpowder.
8
—— My heart returns in a dark overcoat, the brim of its hat pulled low. It talks rapidly, but also with a stutter, like a tommy gun. The couples at the other tables look away. There are various theories as to why. My heart draws a rough map on the back of an envelope. In the piney woods a fat and bleeding sheriff is tied to a tree and crying for mercy.
9
—— I huddle around the trash barrel with a jury of my peers. Although spring, the days are gray and shabby, and the police overtly suspicious. My heart holds its hands out toward the fire. There’s much to say, but no one speaks, afraid to upset the silence following upon the collapse of the great newspapers.
10
—— My heart knows what’s right. It doesn’t know how it knows, but it knows and opens like a red-tinged blossom under the weight of its knowledge. The ropes and pulleys stop; the Napoleonic soldiers stop dragging the peasant girl off into the woods; the clouds stop drifting. I wait for further explanation. None comes. In the grainy light from the window, the blossom is a dark blue.
11
—— Friends forget my birthday. Forget they’re friends. Betray confidences without giving their names. Change their names without telling me. Slice the heads off birds. Leave headless birds on the doorstep. And when I’m near, drop their voices and whisper into the phone. My heart eats a hole in itself just big enough to escape through.
12
—— An engine coughs to life. Startled, I look up. Defendants and their lawyers are dancing around the cannon on the little square of lawn outside the courthouse. They believe the rain has erased any fingerprints. “But that’s stupid,” my heart murmurs, even if something like it happens nearly every afternoon.
13
—— B.’s heart moves in with my heart. At dinner she stares down without appetite at the roses clotting on the plate. I ask how her day was. She shrugs—her heart doesn’t consider languishment and pain to be subjects for dinner conversation. But sometimes it wonders just what took place before it got here that night trembles under the table, waiting for scraps.
14
—— Let others be the dull former children sleepwalking down the aisles of box stores, the married scientists battling killer cockroaches on TV, the apparent suicide who trespassed along the railroad tracks. O frightened beneficiaries of the incidental! B. moves under me, and as the police congregate just south of the train station, my heart spreads like a crime spree across four more states.
15
—— My heart attends twice weekly meetings. I accompany it sometimes for something to do. Other hearts take turns describing their ephemeral feelings of well being. When my heart stands up, it admits to pocketing the dollar tip left on the table for a slow and slovenly waitress. The other hearts listen without comment. My heart finishes and sits back down. Everyone feels a kind of sadness, like when the video rental store is closed.
16
—— When we woke up in the morning, the dog was there as usual, but it couldn’t stand. Every time it tried, its back legs gave out. “Gravity isn’t your friend,” my heart said. I lifted the dog from the floor. B. went to call the vet. Later that day, I was reading Kant at the kitchen table. She kept talking about the dog and breaking my concentration. I noticed the creases in her neck, folds of skin that didn’t used to be there, knife marks, rope burns.
17
—— I’d like to be happy, I really would, I’d like wake up one morning before the accidental discovery of America, or at least without finding my heart quietly smoking by the gas pumps and the state fire marshal banging on the door while neighbors shout useless pieces of unsolicited information— when to declare bankruptcy, how to plan a party—but I can’t, not if the buds of the apple tree are closed and inattentive, and small, frail things crackle underfoot wherever I step.
18
—— A dot of blood where the sun should be. “I’ve nothing to say about it,” my heart said. Trees in full leaf haunted the highway for miles, millions of dimly veined hands reaching out as if begging forgiveness, or offering it—but, of course, I’ve made mistaken inferences from vague gestures before. At the border the guard told me to pop the trunk. My heart rattled like a bottle of pills. It was then the evening arrived with two guns and started shooting.
19
—— It’s a law no one follows. Even so, they pull me from the line and quote Kant’s Categorical Imperative and then laugh at my discomfiture. One of them looks something like my older brother, the same brown eyes and ironic manner. “Just tell what happened in the order it happened,” my heart blandly advises. I would, but all I can recall at this distance is a car honking for me to come out and the moon being lynched from a lamppost and not enough light.
Howie Good is a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize and four times for the Best of the Net anthology. His first full-length book of poetry, Lovesick, was published by The Poetry Press of Press Americana. This book was designed by Justin Runge for Blue Hour Press, printed digitally, and distributed online. The text is set in Adobe Caslon, a variant based on William Caslon I’s renowned typeface.