Dick Westheimer
Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio. He is a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist and Best of the Net nominee. His poems have appeared or upcoming in Whale Road Review, Rattle, OneArt, Banyan Review, Minyan, and Stone Poetry Review. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by SheilaNaGig Editions. More at www.dickwestheimer.com
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After the Heart Attack When I Was Dead
There wasn’t a tunnel. I saw no light.
But there was my teen child, alone
at his recital, his baritone raised to a crowd of strangers,
him hitting that G above middle C for the first time
without me. The nurses hovered
as I wound down. Less than a heartbeat, they said.
Less than breath, less than my chest
filled with a sack of ballast stone. Zero
is what I felt. No pulse. No pressure
as measured by the cuff. Silence. Easy,
to just go away, to fade
as lovely as twilight to a starless dark.
It was then I saw my wife
fade to gray, her hues abraded
by day after day of worry, raising up
that boy who would be a man—
him singing into an audience of no dad.
I reached to the volume knob and turned
it back up. I saw the tunnel, the brilliant light
the sea of quiet, and left it behind for
the clangor-lit ER, the bang of gurney into doorjamb,
the pffff pffff pffff of the blood pressure cuff,
the panic pitch of the night nurse who thought
she saw me die, the sound of my son hitting
that G4 in full voice as if I’d never left, my wife
at the recital with an empty seat beside her
saved for me.
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