Stephen Lackaye

The Heart in the Royal Ontario Museum

If you’ve ever pushed a small car
over untrod ground in the dark
of a monster’s chest cavity,
in a rubber suit, towards a hole
that you carved out of the night
with a miniature chainsaw,
then maybe you can imagine it,
the largest heart in nature,
preserved for the first time
outside the body: inflated
to diastole, and soaked
6 months in acetone
until every molecule of water
was replaced, resistant to
the hands of museumgoers
warned not to touch by
the hopeless nearby sign. 

But once it was there,
if you could, how could you not?
In life its beat was heard
2 miles away, mistaken
in its reach for other
movements of the ocean,
until, lifted in a harness
from its first slump onto earth,
and even settled on its plinth,
it risks to crash at some
late hour, laboriously
to the floor, another
movement of the world
heard by the night patrolman
spiraling through halls
at the end of the block,
who’s barely interrupted
from how quietly, he thinks,
he’ll close the door
to his daughter’s room
after he’s looked in on her.
He has no shame for the
indulgence, not knowing
how the little mysteries
of scraping cylinders,
of latch on plate, will
manifest in dream. 

Because even he has felt
the plastinated thick of it,
the heart of the blue whale, pale
with what keeps it, and knows
it’s nothing like what rises
from the darkest quarters
seen by beasts requiring,
however occasionally, to surface,
how even then, before us,
it is still beyond conceiving
to the heart in its regular fist
furious at work, carrying
despite its labor, nowhere
on the air. It has one sense
it’s said to measure with,
by which it comprehends how
after process to preserve it,
every thought derived of
what’s been drawn with hands
in gloves out of the dark,
will only ever be again
derived of what it’s not.

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Stephen Lackaye’s first collection of poems, Self-Portrait in Dystopian Landscape, won the Unicorn Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and Eric Hoffer Prize. Recent poems have appeared in Southern Review, Southern Indiana Review and Los Angeles Review, among others. He lives with his family in Oregon, where he is a bookseller.