What the heart is
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The heart is a triangle.
With one fewer side, the triangle becomes an opening door.
The door can close into a line.
Is the heart a path when emptied of blood?
The heart is a hallway.
Or panopticon.
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As in a tree, from which every other artery travels.
A tree breaks into triangles (leaves) and hearts (leaves).
Sometimes hearts are carved into trees. (By who?)
But these are not real hearts.
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Who are the three balances in the balance?
How does a triangle flatten.
Is it self-sustaining.
Does it take sides.
The heart is rounded, all walls smoothing into a drum.
A drum will sound more or less hollow depending on where you strike it.
So the heart drops its thinning noise.
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When the sky is cold, the leaves fall, which makes the tree or heart cold too.
The leaves grow red in the cold.
The scare goes out of them—not the blue.
Which one stands at the triangle’s point?
The spear of a heart.
The same doped liquid moving & moving through it.
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A heart is a triangle.
A triangle is a heart.
A heart has smoothed sides, with thick tubing coming out.
A triangle is not equal, except when each side is slated.
Will the triangle level to line?
Does the heart become a vein when it is, for that lubbing second, blank?
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Of course the heart can close its door.
Like a shut vein, as in when the wrist is pressed down.
After air, an opened vein will close.
Winds close doors.
So what moves through the heart’s hallway?
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– The heart is a live fist
– The heart is a turnaround
– The heart is a name of a room that is moving
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The heart also speaks to a sort of must.
To expansion and puncture the heart sets a life.
When the heart has holes the air can drown it out.
The ground and the sky are against this.
Then the heart lets the song out of its room.
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The repeated triangle opens a wall up into…
I mean in this light the heart seems very obvious:
The heart is some kind of frog.
Or in the throat of a frog a balm films over.
The heart in crackles holds no water and not even its own water.
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I want the threat of balance, the stear set at center.
In the spinning cable is some truth of story.
The heart’s triangle is carried through long clouds.
Draw me out by this water.
| Anne Marie Rooney |
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levelheaded: What the heart is
Anne Marie Rooney’s “What the heart is” demonstrates the emotional truth-seeking of a single consciousness. Rooney’s speaker uses a kind of poetry mathematics to create her proof, arriving at a personal directive after having shown how she got there.
With the immediate comparison to a triangle, the poem’s geometry comes into play. The words “heart,” “is,” and “triangle” appear throughout, symbols manipulated by the composer of this proof. Distinct shapes are present: a door (cube), a hallway (cube), a drum (cylinder), a room (cube), a vein (cylinder). There are walls, lines, and sides. While the title forecasts definition, that it contains a question word is an acknowledgment of the impossibility of defining a heart in mathematical terms.
The poem’s shapes constantly mutate and move. The “triangle becomes an opening door,” which “can close into a line.” Things empty, break, flatten, drop, smooth. No wonder this speaker, trying to pin down a heart’s significance, continues for ten sections in meditative chase. Where enjambment would have necessarily drawn attention to the variety of readings of the lines, all her lines are end-stopped, adding to the sense of logic, clarity, and momentum.
The penultimate stanza signals the proof’s imminent Q.E.D. with “The heart is some kind of frog.” This single indented line marks the first occurrence of something else possessing a heart in the poem (although trees are alive, their only hearts are those “[s]ometimes [. . .] carved into” them, “[b]ut these are not real hearts”). Finally, “truth” surfaces in the last stanza, and the poem ends with the speaker’s command: “[d]raw me out by this water.” Note the absence of “heart,” “is,” and “triangle.” We’ve reached the elegant conclusion of this thinking. The heart, for all her efforts to explain in solid terms, manifests itself fluidly.
Writers tread dangerously when their work circles often explored topics such as the heart. But Rooney’s brave earnestness pays off; her theorem deserves to be included in math and poetry (and science, social studies, history, psychology, physical education, etc.!) curricula.
– The Editors
