Dreamheart

Tony Hoagland

They took the old heart out of your chest

all blue and spoiled like a sick grapefruit

the way you removed your first wife from your life,

and put a strong young blonde one in her place.

What happened to the old heart is unrecorded

but the wife comes back sometimes in your dreams,

vengeful and berating, with a hairdo orange as flame,

like a mother who has forgotten that she loved you

more than anything. How impossible it is to tell

bravery from selfishness down here,

a leap of faith from a doomed attempt at flight.

What happened to the old heart is the scary part:

thrown into the trash, and never seen again,

but it persists. Now it's like a ghost,

with its bloated purple face,

moving through a world of ghosts,

that's all of us;

dreaming we're alive, that we're in love.