Mark Nepo: To Know by Heart

When I looked in your eye, the light was just right.
I could make out the markings behind your seeing,
through which you perceive everything. There was the
door you hid behind as a child, the wood through which
your father's voice would raise. And the neighbor's bird
feeder which you could see from your first apartment,
the one the goldfinch would dart in, that spring we
fell in love. And the photo of your Uncle Billy standing
with a mug of coffee, listening softly to everything you
every wanted to say. Sometimes, when alone enough,
before you're up, I stare into the mirror in the guest
room, reaching for the markings behind my eye. This
is harder but they are there. How I would wheeze as a
boy in the dark wondering about God. My first glimpse
of the Pacific after college. And Grandma's thick open
palms that fed goats in Russia, that felt the ocean through
the hull of the ship that brought her to America, the hands
that rubbed her chest when her Nehemiah died. It's hard to
say how, but I see life through the water of her palms. How
does that work? How does the heart like the bottom of a river
keep shifting its features? To graduate into the world, we are
required to memorize practical and odd things: the number
of feet in a mile, the year Henry VIII beheaded Anne Boleyn,
the degree at which clouds will freeze their rain. But since
death is the mirror we eventually move through, let's stop
carrying the things we repeat and start holding things
with our eyes. To know by heart is to warm the
broken as they lay down in the sand of your eyes.