To the Friend Who Can’t Tell a Turtle from a Lump of Pond Gunk

Cynthia Marie Hoffman

Neither can I. This algae bloom is a
Rorschach test. A turtle can slow its heart
to a single beat per minute in order to survive.
Once a week, if we’re lucky, we get away
for a walk, talk about our kids and our clutter.
I’ve just come from an MRI. The technician
pulled the bobby pins from my hair, which
I’d forgotten. Once, he said, some pins
were whipped out by the magnets
and flew around the room. He didn’t say
they were like dragonflies, but look
at these long dark abdomens zipping
across the water! He said they’d
stab you in the eye. I don’t want to
die any more than my friend wants
to die. She measures her beats per minute
with a watch. She’s meticulously
alive. Today, the trees bloom
white with fungus, a host of angel
wings, and I know it means heart rot
deep inside the trunk. Sometimes,
at home, when it’s very quiet, I hear
heavenly music. But it’s just
the air conditioning whirring through
the metal ducts inside the walls. Scientists
have found a vast network of threads
fungi use to signal to each other under-
ground. As we walk, electricity pulses
in secret beneath our feet. The wings
are called fruiting bodies, even though
they are the fruit of death. At night, my friend
tries to calm the clobbering in her chest, claim
some shut eye before a kid comes slapping
his bare feet into the room, shrouded
in a quilt of bucking horses. Maybe it would help
to know, at first I was scared
of sliding into the white shaft of the machine
until I realized there was a mirror
that let me see my feet, which were still in the room
though my head was ascended into a cloud
portal where it seemed I might be buried
in light, and a voice came
through a wire that promised
if I could stay still a few more
minutes, I could get my feet back
on the ground. Scientists have isolated
the pacemaker cells that keep the turtle’s
heart beating. I don’t know what will
happen, but let’s not rush home to the
leaking faucet just yet, the ants
hauling cat food behind the walls.
Today, we linger long enough
on the bridge to notice a ripple in the water,
a small dome-ceilinged cathedral
where the saint’s heart beats perfectly preserved,
making its way toward us through the sludge.