Heart to Heart

Rita Dove (1952 – ) ↗

It’s neither red
nor sweet.
It doesn’t melt
or turn over,
break or harden,
so it can’t feel
pain,
yearning,
regret.

It doesn’t have
a tip to spin on,
it isn’t even
shapely—
just a thick clutch
of muscle,
lopsided,
mute. Still,
I feel it inside
its cage sounding
a dull tattoo:
I want, I want—

but I can’t open it:
there’s no key.
I can’t wear it
on my sleeve,
or tell you from
the bottom of it
how I feel. Here,
it’s all yours, now—
but you’ll have
to take me,
too.

Notes

Where Walt Whitman looked up into the cosmic night to escape dry classroom diagrams, Rita Dove strips romance of its red velvet mythologies, reducing the human heart down to its stubborn, biological reality: a muscular fist of meat and salt pumping blindly in the dark. The speaking subject dismantles the sentimental commodity of love to confront the unadorned real, recognizing that genuine intimacy begins only when we stop projecting grand symbolic illusions onto a vessel that simply refuses to stop beating. It anchors September’s theme of Echo in the rhythm of vital recurrence, reminding us that devotion is not an immaculate fairytale, but a steady, unglamorous cadence that returns to us pulse after pulse, enduring long after the decorative words have faded. #September #RitaDove #Love #Heart #Poetry

About the author

Rita Dove ↗

Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020, she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.