Lessons for the human heart

Periodically I like to fly around the earth and look at things. Google Earth and Google Street view has made this a lot of fun. Much of my curiosity comes from an interest in maps and later Geographic Information System (GIS) imagery. When I worked for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) the imagery we used for mapping was bought from contractors who flew certain areas as requested. Google was using some of those same images. Now, of course, Google uses contracted planes and satellites to capture the imagery and create their maps; these are updated fairly regularly as I found my raised bed sunflower garden from last summer is on the current Earth view. Street view isn’t updated as often. The imagery for the front of my house is from June 2013.

Being able to access these images, and the ability to drop in on a street, has been quite helpful as well. I was working on a poem one day and thought, what was the name of the street that ran behind our apartment building in Formia, Italy? A few minutes later I was there outside the apartment on Largo Enirco Berlinguer. By walking down to the next street, I was able to fine the name and stand outside a small park where my children used to play.

This afternoon, after a busy morning in and out of the rain, I laid down with Ursula [side note 1: she’s gained a pound in the past two months] to nap, but I got very, very distracted after looking at a couple of places I fly over a lot. I thought, hey, Mom told me that the house they sold in Wallowa burned and I wondered if this view was available. It is not. But, after flying in and over I dropped into street view. [Side note 2: the other day I was reading some information about how on Google Earth you rarely see people in the imagery from above. And I did some tests one Naples Italy and then the Gateway Arch in Saint Louis. You can’t see people (well, mostly) because of the way they overlay the imagery, interesting stuff.] So, here I am on a rainy afternoon with a purring cat, scrolling across the world to Wallowa Oregon and finding the house where my parents lived until June 2019. I ticked the little person on Google Earth and drop to street view; there they are, my mother and father working in the yard. This image tells me it is from April 2012; it made me laugh. What are the odds you’d capture the two of them (and the dog!). Or that someone would look for something else and find someone who was missing in plain sight all those years?

     Anatomy Lesson

 
I should have known how the heart works
not the medically technical – valves and chambers
structure of the heart wall, but the chutes
and ladders, the twister version
how one falls down into the echo
how hard it can be to un-hear and crawl out.
 
At the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry you could
enter into a heart as though a confessional
stand in the left atrium and listen to the hushed
lubb/dubb of synthetic rhythm, lose yourself
to the chambered beat. The plastic wall glowed
like bubble gum or a fiery dawn. At times
the heart is furious, on fire, racing to
catch the mind – or mouth – a slow neighbor
calling “No!”.
 
I wonder if the lesson on how to live
with the intricate clichés of the heart happened
on a day I was absent from class.
Maybe that Spring when the snow melted
early and I ran flying a kite followed
by new lambs, all of us jumping and bleating.
I paid more attention to my steps than that
caged muscle in my chest. How did I miss
knowing this fragile thing? Forget cholesterol
and clogging fat, this fist that beats, stalls, breaks
and stops … how do we survive at all?