Prophecy of the Heartbeat
by Chad Sweeney
or the hours will drift sideways you’ll be
old in
Texas imbroglios of fire
tracing the objects in your kitchen
the pain in your teeth
the pain of all that never
will fissure the windows when trucks rattle past
or each time you marry
seven veils float as egrets over the delta
and each day will hold you like this
your eyes shocked open by love
**
or your most intimate moment
will be preparing your father’s
body for the wake
touching his jawline, his cheek, the
swelling in the neck, to loosen
his tie, his
hair, brush it over, the cotton in
his mouth, his
eyelids taped shut sorry
father his eye
brows penciled in jesus
help me the bruises in purple bloom
weeping and orphaned you
will be the one to do this
one morning the choir re
hearsing for paradise in the next room
**
or you’ll stand at the screen door
staring into a tornado
you’ll stand before a mirror your
wedding
dress fallen to the floor, you’ll
stand in the north field scanning
the rye for your daughter, black
shock of hair among the rows
you’ll return home to set the table humming
you’ll
rob the bank you’ll answer the phone you’ll
brush your father’s hair yes you’ll
lift your daughter up to the sun
then bend to pick up the dress
and tomorrow and tomorrow
you will build a house of actions
in which to live
a river of fire and poppies coursing through you
on a Saturday bicycle, an August lawn chair
a train wending up the California Coast
running away running toward home at last
inside the motion
and if our alphabet were spoken
by a different sequence
where would this train be going
____________________________
from the poet
“Prophecy of a Heartbeat” is a selection drawn from, The Futures, a book of prophecies comprised of a single poem, one sentence that begins with “or” and ends with “or” to show the continuity of time without end. The project is in dialogue with ancient and medieval traditions of prophecy, yet rather than representing time and “fate” as deterministic and linear, these prophecies attempt to trace multiple possible futures for an era of quantum physics and dramatic ecological and socio-economic changes.
Chad Sweeney is a poet and translator. He is the author of six books of poetry, Little Million Doors (Nightboat Books, winner of Nightboat Prize, 2019), Parable of Hide and Seek (Alice James Books), Arranging the Blaze (Anhinga Press), White Martini of the Apocalypse (Marick Press), Wolf’s Milk:the Lost Notebooks of Juan Sweeney (Forklift Books, bilingual Spanish/English) and An Architecture (BlazeVOX Books), and two books of translation, The Art of Stepping Through Time, the selected poems of Iranian dissident poet, H.E. Sayeh (White Pine Press, with Mojdeh Marashi) and Pablo Neruda’s final book, The Call to Destroy Nixon and to Advance the Chilean Revolution (Marick Press, 2019).
Sweeney’s poems have been included in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Verse Daily, American Poetry Review, New American Writing, and the Writer’s Almanac. He is the editor of the anthology, Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds: Teaching Artists of WritersCorps in Poetry and Prose, and Iroquois elder Maurice Kenny’s posthumous collection of poetry and prose: Monahsetah, Resistance, and Other Markings on Turtle’s Back. Chad Sweeney holds an MFA from San Francisco State University and a PhD from Western Michigan University. He is an Associate Professor of English/ reative Writing at California State University San Bernardino and lives in southern California with his partner, Jennifer Kochanek Sweeney, and their two children.