In cardiac rehab there would be nights you can’t sleep.
Others who overheard confirmed that sleep is a commodity.

When you get up to go your left ankle hurts a little and is swollen
where you can’t see your veins and arteries anymore.

The worms have tunneled back in and there will be no catching them now
for fishing today without digging and getting your hands dirty.

Before open heart they did this gel and echo thing on your arteries in your legs,
arms, seeing which ones could be harvested. The measuring scale is 1 – 7

They like 3’s and 4’s, unlike high card wins. Middle of the road worm thickness.
So, at 3 in the morning months after the operation, you start ruling out

congestive heart or kidney failure due to arterial failure. Then you go down
the checklist that it’s not a blood clot or chronic venous insufficiency.

Of course, it could finally be cirrhosis of the liver. There you were drunk
on a dare, naked, early at sixteen swinging on a thick tree vine over

the old watering hole down by the creek with the poisonous moccasins
swirling, waiting below like alligators. You dreamed of being Tarzan.

You became an All-American swimmer in high school, college, only to throw
in the towel after not making the Olympic team. You switched to swimming

in single malt scotch and cocktails at 5, like your Dad, who was always away on business
like your wife is now. The fondest memory of your father is watching the NBC nightly news

each night, since he created the Huntley/Brinkley report. Now Dad lives
only in the Broadcast Hall of Fame for his accomplishments, not for teaching

you said that holding your liquor is the true measure of a man.
He never held you growing up or after you moved onto college and

he can’t hold you now. Here at 3 in the morning where you are scared,
like he was the night before the morning of his life-ending massive heart attack.

Now you drift into denial, start looking up Nephrotic syndrome and arguing
in your freshman philosophical head, if God is knowledge, then what is Google?

What is artificial intelligence? You almost feel there is no need for
the question mark, since it all is redundant. This lack of sleep, this thing

some might call insomnia. But cardiac patients get to call it a symptom.
Something they get to weigh like a fish, like you and your Dad, the only

shared time was fishing, where you had to keep quiet. Now you weigh
the obesity of love and bad eating decisions and the abandonment of exercise.

You try to decide if it’s time to dial 911 or just drive yourself up to the ER,
no use in scaring anyone this time of night. Time is muscle. Time is muscle.

It keeps coming back to you, what the nurse said in cardiac rehab, almost
like a religious chant. Time is muscle. And you have let time destroy yours

to the point you say, just fuck it, just take a couple aspirin with a tall glass of water.
After all, maybe it was just the veggie pizza your finally ordered earlier for dinner

with the extra tomato sauce and the extra black olives laying their like discarded
heart valves. It’s four months after open heart. Can’t you have a little fun?

Then you think about all the cheese and thickening blood and you are back
to your left ankle. Would it be better if it was both your ankles?

Some sort of unity? You brain returns to the checklist. You are not jaundice.
Your stool is not pale. Your urine not dark. No recent bruising easily. Hit me.

I more or less give up. Resign to the fact it’s going to be like this from here on in.
A turbulent flight cruising through the cloudy skies of disease.

# # #
Bill Garten has published poetry in Rattle, Interim, Asheville Poetry Review, California State Poetry Quarterly, Portland Review, Wisconsin Review, Antietam Review, The Comstock Review, The Chaffey Review, Hawaii Review, Portland Review, Poet Lore and others. He is a graduate student in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Ashland University. He also has been anthologized in Wild Sweet Notes, And Now The Magpie and What The Mountains Yield.

Photo: Heather Zabriskie