The mimic heart will learn to sit in a surgeon’s hand,
ectoplasm in the form of a phone. It’s fast as rats.
It tots up the risk in every alternative future – burn or leave.
The real heart sleeps a ragged sleep like a dog by a fire.

It’s the father we were told to love, slow with heavy maths.
Once in a while we find the funding to make him lift
his occult platinum gaze and churn his thoughts
across one careful question, like an eclipse traversing.

The cost is huge. The birds stop singing.
He takes half a week in the transect, every light squibs.
Here and now the gobshite son is flush with information
distributing it all over the shop, plus or minus his cut.

On the table is the offering, a tenuous box of blood.
In its panic mess, you can hardly distinguish chamber
from valve, unplait the lumpy piping. It’s nothing but spirit
from which the surgeon is burning away the scars.

The heart’s electricity will test it like a halo, or wings.
The nimble son of man is near at hand, the absent father
saying little in a supercooled warehouse. Wish us luck.

© Judy Brown

*The Three Gods of the Heart was first published in Finished Creatures, October 2019. *