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490 LISTEN HERE with paisley scarves. As Mary, she crosses the room regally, diaphanous in her mother's hemmed-up nightgown. Outside, the snow loves everything it touches. Suffering and death keep their distance from the warm house. Jesus laughs as Mary tickles his brand-new body. You be the manger, Mom, Mary says. I cross my legs, sit the baby, fat with love, on the throne of my body, done with the hard births, the beginnings of God. ECHOCARDIOGRAM from Old & New Testaments (1995) An occasional turbulence ofthe heartofno consequence, said the first doctor who heard it, listening, eyes closed, like a god to a conch. But the doctor I visit for a sore throat is less sanguine: You could drop dead tomorrow. He sends me right over to a specialist. The specialist sits beside me on the narrow bed and asks about my family. I tell him of my mother's murmur, and how my father's father, sick with pneumonia, slumped as his wife rubbed his head. I turn away, stretch out on my side, open my shirt. He circles his arm round my chest, and with cold steel he roots for my heart. His electronics amplifY the sound of an earnest washing machine, not the African drum of the heart I walked through as a child at the Museum of Science and Industry, a maze ofplush vestibules I lingered in, peering down the corridors of blood. And, supposedly, my mother's real mother diedyoung, I add. "She grieved herselfto death. " LYNN POWELL 491 His eyes stay fixed on the craggy sierra my heart is etching on the screen: Hold still. I stiffen, stare at the smooth, green, cement block wall. It's best not to hold a baby you mustgive away, her doctor must have said, wrapping it quickly in a white blanketthough later the nurse brought her a wet, black lock. Down the hall she could hear a baby crying, crying. In her own room the radiator ticked its heat like a trapped cicada. A slightprolapse, a valve that lets the blood seep a little backwards, he says, measuring peak and ravine, calculating volume per second. Perfectly innocent. You can button up your blouse. Back home, I lift my daughter's shirt and press my ear to her chest, her pale nipples small as chamomile-until she giggles. No murmur, the doctor said when she was born. No murmur, no murmur, I repeat above her, her little heart churning out its clear lub dubs, her valves snapping shut without a whisper back. For weeks I browse encyclopedias, unearth old anatomy texts, then decide to visit the Philadelphia copy ofThe Heart. Inside the Institute, I coax my daughter past the spinning discs of Optical Illusion, the button-ready syntheses of Sound. We round a corner and, just as I've promised, it's there: tall as our house, a winter clutch of blue ivy snaking the smooth outside, God's fist inside pounding the table ... Too scary, she cries, clinging to methen runs out for comfort toward the birth of tornados, the measurement of earthquakes. ...

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