Music in the Kingdom of the Heart
- Music in the Kingdom of the Heart
In the echocardiogram, the muscle lookslike a human drumming, though the technicianholding the transducer to my chest, merely chuckleswhen I tell her this. Maybe after seeing a thousandof these muscles close up, she is inured to their natures,her job being to look for what is flawed or broken.
When I think of a pump and valves, it soundslike an engine, but the whirl in me is morethan machine: the sonic arms of valves thrust openand bang closed with a kind of music, as if lifedepended on rhythm. Which of course it does.
I used to be a drummer, but was no good. Still,I tell the technician the old drumming joke:There are three kinds of drummers, I say,those who can count, and those who can’t.
Sometimes I experienced the “drummer’s high,”which neuroscientists explain as the measurableunity between brains in the act of collaboration.And sometimes even a weary somatic metaphormakes a person’s feeling clear: my heart is broken.Maybe the issue is that even in married life,I thought one plus one equaled one.
Hold still, she says and moves the wandaround, We’re almost through, echoingwhat he’d said: We’re through. [End Page 709] Soon, someone will cut a small hole in my thigh,snake a camera into my femoral artery up my torsoin order to see the drummer under my left breastwho thrums so wildly, and look for evidenceof what went wrong, which he will not find. [End Page 710]
laura mcCullough is a poet and prose writer whose work has appeared in the Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Guernica, Pank, Gulf Coast, Writer’s Chronicle, and others. Her books include Jersey Mercy, A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race, and Rigger Death & Hoist Another. She teaches at Brookdale Community College, and is on the faculty of the Sierra Nevada low-res MFA. She is the founding editor of Mead: The Magazine of Literature and Libations.
