The Cold-Hearted Son Almost Speaks Up—Mischa Willett

Stack Takeover: Mischa Willett. Over the next two months, we’ll be reading poetry from Mischa every week, including four poems published for the first time on this Substack. For an introduction to Mischa, read Ben Palpant’s interview with him here.

The Cold-Hearted Son Almost Speaks Up

by Mischa Willett

How long following one’s father’s major
heart surgery is it appropriate 
to wait before bringing up life’s minor
incendiaries and minutiae without appearing  

callous or unconcerned? As I understand
it, he’d managed a blood clot
in the Aorta, little demonstrator sitting
in the highway of his heart, her squatting

tying up traffic for blocks on end.
Pretending I’m still filled with gravitas
two weeks out though, once he’s begun
a full recovery, is a bit beyond me. Gradually,

the stuff of life trickles back, refilling
an enormous lack thereof we’d cleared 
out of our days to make some room, an empty
stage on which to play out a final bow he didn’t 

take; penultimate last act. But it wasn’t that!
He came through! And now shouldn’t the song
switch from dirge to dance? Televised, this
would be the scene of the second chance, and our need

to go close one, and catch our collective 
breath would be punctuated by a laugh track.
Here, we might relax back into what individual
normalcies we knew prior to the brace 

and bating of possible grief: 
to grow glad we have this dry meanwhile, 
if dull, and brief.

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Mischa Willett (Ph.D.) is the author of two books of poetry, including The Elegy Beta (2020) and Phases (2017) as well as of essays, translations, and reviews that appear in both popular and academic journals. A specialist in nineteenth-century aesthetics, he teaches English at Seattle Pacific University.