Heart Scars

Gwinnett Medical Center, 
Lawrenceville, Georgia
August 14, 2017

The surgeon said I have a raw heart,
that where he worked his high-tech
wire would heal and bear no scars.

But all he had were images,
renderings of my left atrium
processed by silicon circuits,
color coded for conductivity,
rogue circuits splotched red
across my pulmonary veins.

They fairly danced with life,
made my heart skip stutter-
step beats. That was before.

Now the big veins stand inert,
gun-metal gray, dull as lead
pipes, bare limbs of an ancient
oak shattered by a blue bolt,
frozen and fossilized — this
the price for too much life.

I walk through new life
with a hole in my heart.
I bear invisible tattoos.

Can a body hit sixty-eight
without a rough mark
clawed across the vitals?
Could a soul survive so long
in the land of incarnation
without the grace of scars?

Technology is miracle. Hospitals
crawl with angels. Doctors patch
bodies for a few more rounds.

But raw hearts ride currents
no machine can measure. Sinking,
I am buoyed by a thousand ‘thoughts
and prayers.’ Flailing, I am borne
again to source or abyss. Surely
I will drown in a sea of grace.

To Make a Frost Flower

Athens, Georgia

December 14, 2015; revised 2016

You could go a whole life 

scarcely aware of ephemera. 

How frost flowers grace 

the morning hours in unkempt 

ditches, ragged shoulders, 

borders and abandoned fields 

that first hard freeze of fall. 

Consider the white crownbeard  

how it grows. It flourishes 

in heat of summer, flowers 

ugly early autumn, leaves 

a stick carcass standing 

barren to the bitter wind 

that rattles down the winter. 

But come the quiet dawn 

when cold envelops open 

fields and seeps inside 

the hardened earth — 

when morning crackles 

frostweed blooms. Up 

from old roots, sap bleeds 

through breached stems, 

oozing into open air

as frozen locks of cotton 

candy, silver swirls 

of crystal clouds leaven 

its now broken body. 

Translucent grace is born 

to morning, gone by noon. 

Wounded by winter the weed 

turns guts to ghostly flowers 

and waits for the inconceivable 
spring to rise again from roots.