I Am the Big Heart

Sarah Venart

• Publisher: Brick Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781771315371
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women in Poetry
• Index: Literature

A love story to the emotional self—this heart is tender, but it also has a savage bite.

What does it mean to be the big heart? Or to hope to be the big heart? Or to fail to be that big heart? How far can a heart stretch? How does being a parent stretch it further? How does a heart manage under the pressure of children, of self, of hospital technician, of partner, of death? In this collection, big heartedness is both demand and desire. It emerges from family life—the kid who says to your face that she prefers her other parent; the father monkeying around in the art gallery; the mother who "gets on with it" in silence; the husband, distant and intimate under the marriage yoke. There is also in this collection the stirring of wilder desires than family is supposed to nurture, feelings more fiercely self-assertive than a parent—a mother particularly—is supposed to admit. This collection asks how to rise to the occasions that family presents and also how to let oneself spill over the bounds of familial roles.

Venart's poems reach into the past but don't get lost there; they look the present in the face—they have to: the clock is ticking, the children calling, there are hot dogs to be sliced and the dog won't walk itself. The title is ironic. And also kind of secretly stoically hoping that it's not ironic. But it is:

…And now everyone is arrow
arrow, arrows. Everyone harpoons.
And I am the big heart, aren't I?
When my black dog was being put down, in her last
second I whispered, Squirrel.
(from "Epiphany")

Flowers for All Occasions

Then

found poem, Mommy’s journal

the ducks would rise from the river

the sky would darken

the birds would stop singing

the smoke would come in at the windows

the cake would fall in the middle

the dog would be lost

the dishes would never get done

the grass would turn into wildflowers

the rocks would pile at the edge of the water

the crows would find him

The Rising Action

My mother’s brazen germination: the doctor’s son

flirting with the kitchen help. He pocketed her hand, jimmied the girl

through the back door, walked her backward

to the barn. In the breezeway, the playfulness

went south. It took her breath away, his shameless lifting

of the apron, the skirt.

My mother was the rough idea that insisted on thriving

up the backstairs, over a kitchen: a dark-loving plant in a basket.

My mother was coal smoke, rickets,

dirty bibs, a stroller missing a wheel and sinking

as the tide came in. I know her name

changed three times. I know the date and place of birth,

not much more. But in the black dust of her moods,

she took me back to that foundling house.

I saw why the breadknife was sometimes

at the ready. I know enough:

you leave a room, you look over your shoulder.

You find a white stone in the sand, you ask for what you need.

Then throw it in the air.

Wild Exile

She stops the car in the red dirt

in front of a house that could be the house,

could be doorknob, clothesline, craggy grey shingles

where she spent her third year.

Nothing is different from her memory, but nothing

is the same either. A picture of a house

is not a real house.

She walks down to the brook,

which is where she left it. When she slides her feet

into the cool tawny water, she tries to put things

back into place, but a mink darts

under a tree root, catfish wind themselves

darkly upstream, and all the birds go silent,

pretending to be leaves. Nothing here for her.

Now the house, its hill, even her car

huddle suddenly into shadow,

a great cloud folding over a valley.

But under her feet the water has cleared,

the stones bare as a winter floor—

What’s there to cry about? House,

your floors were so cold.

At the Foundling Home

found poem, Mommy’s journal

there were always little children you could hug

and older children who’d touch you.

Back to the Land

I asked what happened to her.

She answered obscurely: board to nail,

nail to board. She knew what she knew and she bound it

in thread. Around that she bound twine. She crumpled it

like paper and with a match made her tinder.

She added bark, snapped kindling, then softwood,

and one chunk of hardwood with a burl.

In the kitchen, she cut what she knew

from an animal belly, leaving a firm strip of fat.

When she roasted it, blisters formed

and dripped in the ash. In the flames on its skin

she saw leaps and retractions. She ate her fill

and there wasn’t a word about love.

When she couldn’t sleep, she sat in the...

Table of contents

• The Big Heart
• Still Full of Arrows
• Flowers for All Occasions
• The Heiress
• Joy in the Cloisters
• Notes
• Acknowledgements