The Woman Who Could Not Live with Her Faulty Heart
I do not mean the symbol
of love, a candy shape
to decorate cakes with,
the heart that is supposed
to belong or break;
I mean this lump of muscle
that contracts like a flayed biceps,
purple-blue, with its skin of suet,
its skin of gristle, this isolate,
this caved hermit, unshelled
turtle, this one lungful of blood,
no happy plateful.
All hearts float in their own
deep oceans of no light,
wetblack and glimmering,
their four mouths gulping like fish.
Hearts are said to pound:
this is to be expected, the heart’s
regular struggle against being drowned.
But most hearts say, I want, I want,
I want, I want. My heart
is more duplicitious,
though no twin as I once thought.
It says, I want, I don’t want, I
want, and then a pause.
It forces me to listen,
and at night it is the infra-red
third eye that remains open
while the other two are sleeping
but refuses to say what it has seen.
It is a constant pestering
in my ears, a caught moth, limping drum,
a child’s fist beating
itself against the bedsprings:
I want, I don’t want.
How can one live with such a heart?
Long ago I gave up singing
to it, it will never be satisfied or lulled.
One night I will say to it:
Heart, be still,
and it will.
— Margaret Atwood
Lovely poem. I like how she distinguishes the romanticized “love” from the rawer, deeper emotion by saying she is literally talking about the muscle, not the symbol. The first stanza could maybe be rewritten though; the candy heart imagery is overused and certainly needs no elaboration to communicate the meaning. And I’m not sure if I quite get all her line breaks (“Long ago I gave up singing / to it, …”).
But I really like how greatly her initial clarification (that the heart to which she is referring is the muscle) impacts the rest of the poem. Though Atwood continues the poem with figurative meaning of the heart, the raw physical imagery lingers. The reader envisions the hearts floating in the ocean literally; the “I want, I want, I want, I want” reads like a heart beat, and the alternative awkward and irregular. It becomes obvious what Atwood really means by “Heart, be still, / and it will”, as the task of ending one’s love and ending one’s life are one and the same.
There is also a follow-up poem to this, “The Woman Makes Peace With Her Faulty Heart.” Haven’t read it yet, will post later if I think it’s interesting enough.
