Heart Valve

They told me there’d be pain

so when I felt it,

sitting at my beat-up farm desk

that looks out glass doors

onto the browning garden—plain sparrows

bathing in the cube-shaped fountain

so violently they drain it,

the white-throats with their

wobbly two-note song

on the long way south still,

and our dogs

out like lights and almost

falling off their chairs

freed of the real-time for awhile

as time began for me

to swell, slow down, carry me out

of all this almost

to a where

about as strong a lure as love.