The Heart is Hard to Find

By Paul Hostovsky 

When I got cancer I got a gun.

Because my father had cancer.

And he didn’t have a gun.

And he didn’t have a choice 

but to let the doctors shake their heads

over the mutilated remnant 

of his life–which they had mutilated

in their vain attempts to save it.

First, they cut him open and took some things out,

and then they moved some other things around

so he had to shit in a bag after that. 

This is no way to live, he said before he died. 

He died when I was a kid, and now that I have my own kids

I’m wondering: if my father had a gun and if he had 

the balls–if one morning when my mother was at work

and I was in school if he got out of bed

and in his gray bathrobe climbed the little hill

with the overgrown rock garden that was our backyard

and sat down on a rock, just sat there 

for a long time with the gun in his hand,

a long time being of course relative–

half a minute is an unbearably long time

if you’re holding your hand over a flame–

thinking about me and my mother and whether

to put the gun in his mouth or to his temple 

or to his heart–because the heart would be less messy 

but the heart would also be harder to find–

feeling around for it with his left palm

on the left side of his chest, listening with his palm 

for his own heartbeat, finding it, 

then with his right hand

pointing the gun between the fingers 

of his left hand over his heart,

taking aim like that and then

fucking doing it pulling the trigger killing himself 

in his own backyard because This is no way to live–

I am wondering now if he had died like that,

would I ever have forgiven him?