A Lover's Almanac by Maureen Howard

Author:Maureen Howard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

AN ANATOMY LESSON

As you turn the page of the Almanac to see when the sun came up to fix you in the universal whirl, the old ticker pumps away, that sturdy organ, no more than a muscular bag churning its four fluid ounces of blood in each ventricle, less in each auricle. While it dawns on you that Mercury, the elusive planet, was visible only at dawn (February 11-18) and that you have flubbed it again, sleeping through best intentions to see, really see what the heck goes on up there this Winter season rather than wallow in sludgy waking dreams that inevitably involve some slight or triumph of the past, or succumb to damp semiorgasmic scenes, well, all that selfindulgent time your heart’s been on duty, thumping away through the night while you were afloat in the murky pool of lust and fear.

Mercury’s gone to an inferior conjunction. You are heartsick, not really but there is a sour chemical suffusion in the thorax, so you say “heartsick,” your regret about Mercury pretty thin, comparable to losing your heart in fifth grade or a sin of omission, forgetting to watch the final PBS episode in which the crime is solved. You will catch that damn planet come June or September, whenever the Almanac (at this date still fresh and unruffled) says it will be in a favorable position for you to observe in this hemisphere, to catch its slow luminosity as it makes its plotted way through the sky. O, save me from being blown forever outside the loop of time. As the heart is the center of all feeling wherein you are proved cold, chicken, fainthearted and so forth, you swear you will not fail the celestial event again. Your lapse forgotten as the day wears on and you remember to feed the birds, to stoke the fire with the ecologically preferable pellets. You help a neighbor charge his battery and are deeply troubled by the television news—a massacre in former Kurdistan, the sexual exploits of yet another senator, a warmhearted liberal. You read heartbreaking stories of banished children mugging and pilfering in the city you have fled, the cold city where kids squat in abandoned apartments cleverly pirating water and electricity (our newest Prometheans) from the city system, but many literally out in the cold. Like so much shrinkwrapped meat ... somewhat disheartening to think of children cuddling for warmth in plastic garbage bags. Here in the burbs, you need only keep track of a warm wind off the Sound which softens the ice to a gritty porous mat at the door, heart to you an anatomically incorrect trinket, symmetrical and famously scarlet.

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