Our encounters in healing can be a curious mingling of procedures and personalities, the clinical and the intimate. In this week’s poem, Gus Peterson writes with great details, voice and allusiveness of a bright if fleeting flash of connection with a physician assistant.

Peterson is the treasurer for the Maine Poets Society and has lived in Maine for the past 20 years. His work has appeared online in “Rattle’s” Poets Respond, “The Lake” and “Clear Poetry,” and in print via “Aurorean,” “The Sandy River Review” and “Northern New England Review.”

 Heart Monitor

By Gus Peterson

It’s my first stint with cardiology

but she’s seen me before.

Seventy-two hours, she says,

voice unrolling like a bolt

of low notes. Don’t get it wet—

no showers, no swimming,

don’t exercise too hard—

but we want you to go about

your life as normally as possible,

she adds, shaving a few hairs

from my chest, taping electrodes

over my cage of ribs. A device

is hung from my neck like a medal

and I notice though her name

starts with a T she initials her

paperwork with the symbol

for Pi. I love numbers, she says,

plugging in the wires,

and recites only the first

dozen numerals after 3.14,

because there’s another patient

behind me and the odds—

I’m not a doctor, mind you—

of something broken at my age

are less than what I’d like

them to be.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Heart Monitor,” copyright © 2019 by Gus Peterson, appears by permission of the author.

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