Heart Shift, and: Winter Light

42 the minnesota review Constance Studer Heart Shift We've got to stop meeting ¡ike this, Paul quips the third time he's kicked out of heaven, wakes up to see paddles in my hands. Idiopath, his doctor writes on his chart, doesn't know why Paul's heart keeps quitting, disease without recognizable cause, origin unknown, but just walking into his room I know. The way a composer looks at a sheet of music and hears a dirge. Too much pain, he whispers, his body a camera set at the widest aperture, sensitive to the tiniest light, his mouth a white line in a long lived-in face ten miles down a bumpy mountain road. Nothing you say can shock me, ever the jester Paul is on mortal notice unless another heart can be found. I've had every test except autopsy . . . that's where I draw the line. Sunlight will take longer to circle his body as it lingers over his face in the mirror. Blood will fade to thin ink writing his signature on the dotted line, leaving his children fixed for life without him. Each breath an act of rebellion, he relearns every day how to live in his wrists, the arch of his foot, the third intercostal space, in his jawbone and eye sockets, how to retrieve voice and hope from defibrillator paddles and call lights, the shiver of leaves. Studer 43 Winter Light "One seesflame in the eyes ofthe young, but in the eyes ofthe old, one sees light." —Victor Hugo Winter, stripped down and simple, is framed by webs of white-feathered branches spiked with rime ice, a canopy luffing in afternoon wind. Worst thing about getting old is that no one ever touches me. Emma unzips her robe, an invitation to let you into her life of wheelchair trips between bed and bath, the swallowing of pills, the rolling of lips, lolling of tongue. Yourfingers are gentle like my husband's. You remove her gown, her back dry and freckled, talcum-powder white with one mole on her right shoulder that you've learned to skirt around. He has asked me to marry him again . . . but I don't know . . . he has eight babies . . . Coyly she laughs, her eyes kissing a young man on bended knee, rose extended. Cloth fitted over hand like a bandage, you wash skin fragile as a leaf. Ancient face rises to meet you, a communion of skin and light reflecting off chrome bed and her love keeping vigil from the dresser. Light blazes into prisms of melting ice, like sun in a grove of aspen, air luminous and blue, shimmering with an ethereal opalescence, the familiar sheen she falls into before the long night. ...