Poetry By Dick Westheimer

       jon oropeza CC



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Intervention in the Waning Day

The son, the husband, the sister, the brother–
we’ve all written letters, like mayoral declarations 
of love to the generous woman we’ll call Artemis. 
She’s locked inside a cage of mania that she’s flooded

with booze. She tried to escape by fading away 
into an ever-smaller body - so thin she can fold 
into a paper strip and tries to slide through 
the keyhole of the shrinking cell of she. She
retreats, locked in the trap that confines her.

I love you and you are going to die if you don’t
get help, we each say. She laughs and she cries 
and she tells of all the times she’s helped herself,
how good she’s become at it, detoxed a thousand times 

and we sigh, breathe deep and try so gently to find
a crack in the steel blue walls enclosing her, to uncover 
a gap big enough to set a lever, to pry slightly so we can slip 
in, let enough light through that she can see herself whole 
in the motes of hope that sift under the door.

Artemis looks down at her baggy clothes, heaves
in shuddering breaths thinking of the grand baby 
she’s afraid to hold. Her face twists, she spits about 
the other son who won’t come around, the one who knows
his mother, another one ravaged by her manic rages.

She notes all this and more and wants less 
of it, more of it, all of her, less of her 
like this, all that she’s lost, endlessly 
recalls why she's crawled into that trap, 
snarls and snaps back – at us, at the world, 
la-la-las Mary Had a Little Lamb, 
Twinkle Twinkle Little…little…little…

And the light fades, the sun sets but no stars 
come out, nothing twinkles. Artemis tosses her head, 
waves us off with the back of her splotched hand, 
declares she’s not interested in help and we leave her 
with our talisman love letters, the treatment center’s 
packing list which she does not wad up 
and throw back at us as we walk off.

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The Heart Is a Brain Is a Muscle Is Pain 

I have a good heart – the kind that is lattice lined
the kind that once failed to beat - the fault 
of arterial muck made of cheese and bad genes.

I have seen on a screen that heart beat, held it in my gaze
as a medical man slipped a wire up the trunk 
of me, a tree, from limb to branch

to the tiny twigs that were meant to feed that beating thing 
so it would feed me, arterial fairy fingers that cupped 
this pulsing thing at the very center of me.

He placed eleven delicate tubes, expanded
like Chinese finger traps, to let the blood flow freely
again.  My doctor told me I would never feel so well 

as when I recovered.  Until the darkness.  The darkness 
always comes, he said.  When you least expect it.
I, he said, have rooted around in the very heart of you

and such things have consequences. When 
the darkness came, I curled up in a ball so small 
I burrowed into the tiniest parts of me 

buried as in a coal mine, tight and near lightless.
There I heard a child’s whimper, or was it me,
sorrowful as wilted vine. 

From up near the light, I heard the Doctor’s words:
“Depression” has had said and now I knew what 
he meant. Later, unburied, I apologized to you.
    
It would have come sooner. I am still ashamed 
that I had to suffer to believe that you did.

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​Dick Westheimer has—with his wife and writing companion Debbie—lived on their plot of land in rural southwest Ohio for over 40 years. His most recent poems have appeared or are upcoming in Rattle, Paterson Review, Chautauqua Review, RiseUp Review, Minyan, Gyroscope Review, and Cutthroat. More can be found at dickwestheimer.com