“The Mysterious Human Heart” by Matthew Dickman

The produce in New York is really just produce, oranges
and cabbage, celery and beets, pomegranates
with their hundreds seeds, carrots and honey,
walnuts and thirteen varieties of apples.
On Monday morning I will walk down
to the market with my heart inside me, mysterious,
something I will never get to hold
in my hands, something I will never understand.
Not like the apricots and potatoes, the albino
asparagus wrapped in damp paper towels, their tips
like a spark of a match, the bunches of daisies, almost more
a weed that a flower, the clementine,
the sausage links and chicken hung
in the window, facing the street where my heart is president
of the Association for Random Desire, a series
of complex yeas and nays,
where I pick up the plantain, the ginger root, the sprig
of cilantro that makes me human, makes me
a citizen with the right to vote, to bear arms, the right
to assemble and fall in love.

Matthew Dickman
The American Poetry Review (November/December 2008)

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