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The Woman Makes Peace with Her Faulty Heart
It wasn't your crippled rhythm I could not forgive, or your dark red skinless head of a vulture.
but the things you hid: five words and my lost gold ring, the fine blue cup you said was broken that stack of faces, gray and folded, you claimed we'd both forgotten, the other hearts you ate, and all that discarded time you hid from me, saying it never happened.
There was that, and the way you would not be captured, sly featherless bird, fat raptor singing your raucous punctured song with your talons and your greedy eye lurking high in the molten sunset sky behind my left cloth breast to pounce on strangers.
How many times have I told you: The civilized world is a zoo, not a jungle, stay in your cage. And then the shouts of blood, the rage as you threw yourself against my ribs.
As for me, I would have strangled you gladly with both hands, squeezed you closed, also your yelps of joy. Life goes more smoothly without a heart, without that shiftless emblem, that flyblown lion, magpie, cannibal eagle, scorpion with its metallic tricks of hate, that vulgar magic, that organ the size and color of a scalded rat, that singed phoenix.
But you've shoved me this far, old pump, and we're hooked together like conspirators, which we are, and just as distrustful. We know that, barring accidents, one of us will finally betray the other; when that happens, it's me for the urn, you for the jar. Until then, it's an uneasy truce, and honor between criminals.
Margaret Atwood
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:hi:
RL
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