“Feel this,” my father says, guiding my hand To the simple Braille of his pacemaker.
“Sixty,” he tells me, “over and over
Like a clock,” and I mention the billion
Heartbeats of the mammal, how the life span Can be rough-guessed by the 800 beats
Per minute of the shrew, the 200
Of the house cat, speeding through their billion In three years, in twelve. How slowly we act, According to our pets. How we are stone
To the frantic insects. “Not slow enough,”
He answers, summing up the math, citing
His two billion heartbeats of punched-in work, The one billion my mother beat to do
The daily double-shift of housekeeper
And clerk until her heart softened to mush.
He’s busy, now, with wiping down his floors The way he swirled a mop through locker rooms Before striding the push broom up and down The grain of gym sweep, repeating the moves Of twenty kinds of cleaning between ten
And six-thirty in the high school I used
Between eight and three-fifteen. He might have Been following the Peterson Method
For care, learning the neat lines and ovals
Of my mother, who wrote to me, the day
She died, a perfectly scripted letter,
Pages of open vowels so nothing
She said could be misread. And even now,
In the attic, inside her black notebooks
Stacked and banded, her carefully copied
Familiar quotes, the good advice
Of the writing exercise dating back
To a hundred lines of ovals, fifty
Of the properly slanted line. Penciled
Pages of strict, block printing, the two-space Capitals, the touch of tall letters to
The roof of lines, my father repeating
The multiplication and division
To the thirty years of humans, how he is
Closing in on three billion while I am
Nearing two. How we are the exception
To the heartbeat system, taking so long
To come of age we have time to practice
The Peterson Method for memory, Preserve these things to open up and read.