Heartsick

I had enough bad luck that summer,
I had enough bad weather, too, the sun
lacquered the windows across the street
that were shut against the heat of noon;
staring out at them from behind the dim
screen of the terminal I knew my neighbors
were sweating in their dark bedrooms,
foreheads leaked on by cooling compresses.

I was spending the summer getting diagnosed,
trudging the hot and littered streets for weekly
visits to a doctor so expensive and remote
my voice shook when I called for my
appointment, and even now he seems
to me a tall white blur in a white coat.
I was not myself. In that heat
my heart had reestablished its old
bad habit of skipping a beat so that
suddenly I felt like a factory out of work,
all the machinery went still, the silence
was deafening and quick, dying seemed
within, then out of reach.

I throve on this medical melodrama, my ill health
sustained me over the bad places until
the police called at seven A.M. to tell me
Raoul Fiori had been picked up for vagrancy
on a traffic island in Lake Street and, not awake,
I said, I'm sorry I don't know any Raoul.
Then there was a blank place, the sound of a precinct,
not sound, really, but to sound what a Xerox
is to print and then a voice—his—but so condensed,
tiny, light, like an insect, like the ghost of a ghost,
Lynn, I need a place to spend the night, it said.

I was not impressed. I did not want to be
disturbed by reveries or guilt, but, all right,
yes, I said, take a taxi, I'll pay
when you get here. And I did.
Because when the door of the taxi
opened and he ducked out into the sun,
sorrow and love kicked me so hard
in the chest my heart just stopped;
it seemed to say, I cannot bear it, you
go on without me. And I did, I walked
down the walk and stood while he
handed my money to the driver
and everything began to take on preternatural

detail. I noticed the shoulder of his leather jacket
scratched and scuffed, and my heart rose up
out of its stutter, its limp, when the next beat
seemed to drip from it achingly, infinitely
slowly, and never arrive, and that dark barn
behind the Blue Lite opened its doors to me
again and I let myself be backed against
the dirty bale, warm against my butt, as this boy,
part gall, part oil, ran his hand below my boned bra
and whispered, Is this the Maginot Line?
while I grew just idiotic with anxiety and lust.

--Lynn Emanuel