Before there is a heart.

It's writing #700 here at the Cabinet, and I feel as though I should do something commensurately grand in celebration. But I'm having something of a lonely evening and don't much feel like writing, not least because I just reread the list I made in celebration of writing #300. (That might have been a mistake: I don't seem to have gotten very far with any of those hopes, save #6--though, to be sure, I didn't see Cambridge coming this time last year, either, and so the dreaming will continue!) And so instead we'll take a look back to a poem I discovered almost exactly a year ago and that rings every bit as true tonight as it did then:

First Vertical Poetry No. 27

Where is the heart I am calling?
Heart become eyelid
of an eye on its way to where I am.
The eye is not here yet and already I can see.
Before there is a heart I am made of beating.
I am calling in an open doorway.
I am calling from inside.

-- Roberto Juarroz (trans. W. S. Merwin)

When we did the favorite poem wall in the officehouse for National Poetry Month, this one was one of mine.