One Poem by Andrew Shields

 

My Bleeding Heart

 

I woke up and my heart was gone.

I heard the door slam, so I threw on my clothes

and followed the trail of blood down the stairs.

 

It wasn't in sight, but the drops were still there,

despite a misty morning rain.

My bleeding heart was beating fast.

 

The hole in my chest was empty and numb

when I saw my heart just turn a corner

and run into the street where a boy had his hands

 

in the air and was backing away from a gun:

"Don't shoot!" he called and he called, "Don't shoot!"

My bleeding heart was standing its ground

 

but fled when the final shot was fired.

Was it the blood of the boy or my heart

that I tracked through the afternoon into the night?

 

I saw it again in a suburban street

going up the steps to a room above

a two-car garage by a storybook house.

 

The girl in that room was too big for the chair

beside her childhood desk, so her legs

were sprawled across the floor in front of her.

 

There were traces of powder on the mirror

she'd used as a kid for her dress-up games.

My bleeding heart tried to take it all in,

 

but her faraway gaze was as slack as her wrist.

It felt for a pulse that was faint and fast,

then fled before the final breath.

 

The trail of blood grew dry until

I saw it shimmering fresh on a path

that led through the woods to a trailer park.

 

The full moon shone on aluminum roofs,

and a candle was lit in one of the windows.

Through the dirty glass it flickered

 

on scraggly hair and hands on a face,

a pistol on a checkered tablecloth.

My bleeding heart would have reached for the gun,

 

but the hands of a soldier are trained to be faster,

and this was the night when the sounds he kept hearing

were silenced by one final shot.

 

How can I follow the growing trail

of so much blood? At dawn I saw

my heart go up the steps of a church

 

and open the double mahogany doors.

But when I got into the dimly lit nave,

where had it gone to? The pews were all empty;

 

the Bible on the pulpit was open

to chapter and verse for the coming day.

My bleeding heart that never prays

 

appeared beside the altarpiece

and sat down beneath it as if to wait.

The ever-brighter stained-glass colors

 

played over it and the floor of the church

until it vanished into the light,

its beating still there at the edge of hearing.

 

I fell to my knees; I fell asleep

and dreamed of the congregation's voices

singing to my heartbeat's rhythm

 

and interrupted by a man

who'd made as if it come for solace.

My bleeding heart awoke in my chest,

 

and I awoke again, the door

unslammed, no trace of any blood

on rug or stairs or stoop or street.

Andrew Shields lives in Basel, Switzerland. His collection of poems "Thomas Hardy Listens to Louis Armstrong" was published by Eyewear in June 2015. His band Human Shields released the album "Somebody's Hometown" in 2015 and the EP "Défense de jouer" in 2016. His poems have recently appeared online in Talking About Strawberries, Delta Poetry Review, London Grip, and Oddball Magazine.

 

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