The heart's heart Poem by Dirk van Bastelaere

It's the heart's heart: heart attack,
when matter hangs and crashes, shot
through with black tissue, by which
the body declares itself, to the house and
its red-blooded habits or the walk
by the freezing reservoir,
to be sunken into its state of flesh,

to be a muscle deserted by being so.

In its blue, the core of its collapse,
the heart is like a beast that, in clammy
exile from oxygen
to the limits of its anatomy,
is more than itself when dying
and thus interwoven with the poem -
which, attack after attack,
presents itself to the passing and so
again and again,

as death strikes the writing,

destroys its part of the world.

Translation by Francis R. Jones