Brown Trout
by Matt Widen
Echocardiography / What We Know of Hearts
by Claire Rupnow
Back when the trees still wore crowns
studded with stubborn crows and cabochons,
and the moon still whispered of dissolving stars
that fell through fish-light nebulas, my mother
told me a secret. When I was thigh-deep in sleep,
she took my hands in her slight wrinkling fingers,
and told me the salmon has in its heart an Aeolian harp.
The slippery heart of the trout has seven slippery
chambers, and the sturgeon is hollow and empty—
its heart martyred when the first fish began to crawl
from the ancient seabeds. I tucked that watery secret
between the folds of my sheets—as if to dry it—
and cried myself into sleep. When I awoke, I was 28
and the silent moon hung hungry over the trees.
A ringing jabbed me like starving bones, and a doctor
on the other end told me a secret. My mother
had never had arrhythmia—it was a minnow-sized
cancer that had gulped in her heart. We scattered her
in the Columbia with Corona Borealis dangling above
and the river rushing between our knees. Days after,
I caught a clumsy salmon and my knife split it from gill to tail,
eager for its gasping heart. With a blood-rush pause
that blotted out the howling freshet, I heard a surging
wind that swam and echoed with a vibrating string.
9