TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

If there’s one thing my kids tease me about more than anything, it’s my sensitivity. They lovingly tease me, I should add. What can I say? I have a tender heart. I often cry during movies. (“Hamnet” about did me in this year!) I get emotional about anything from a sunset to a commercial. The news undoes me. 

Frankly, I don’t know how anyone isn’t undone by the news lately. 

My sensitivity might be both my superpower and also my kryptonite. Still, I can’t imagine having a different kind of heart, although sometimes I wish mine were a little tougher. Not so easily bruised. What would it be like to listen to Sufjan Stevens and not tear up? What would it be like to watch a character die on screen or on the stage and not feel it deeply? Yes, I know those people are only acting, and I don’t know them personally anyway, but I can’t help but grieve in that moment. And yes, if my kids are with me, they’ll give me that look, or nudge me when I start to sniffle and wipe my eyes. It’s now sort of a bit between us.

If I had a different kind of heart, a tougher heart, would I be able to see what’s happening in the world around me and not feel so brokenhearted? What would it be like to be able to sleep through the night, unbothered? I can’t imagine feeling less, or caring less. That’s not the heart I have. 

I love that the speaker of today’s poem is big-hearted and knows it. OWNS it. “Sorry, not sorry,” he seems to say.

Pardon My Heart
by Marcus Jackson

Pardon my heart if it ruins your party. 
It’s a large, American heart and has had

a good deal to drink. It’s a pretty bad 
dancer—too much feeling, too little technique.

It may sing some godless hymns, about ousting 
armies of loneliness, about marching

victorious to wives and towns beneath 
a heart-colored dusk. Pardon my heart

if it closes its eyes for hours, 
whispering rapture  over and over.

Pardon my heart if it laughs too loudly, 
or if it tells many of its stories

too ardently. Pardon my heart if it rests
an arm across you or your friends’ shoulders—

touch allows my heart to trust that it’s not
imagining your company’s loveliness.

Pardon my heart if you have to kick it out. 
After you’ve muzzled the music and brightened

the lights to tidy, my heart will ignore 
and keep doing its little two-step, aglow

in the middle of the room, never 
happier to have nowhere else to go.

"Pardon My Heart" by Marcus Jackson from PARDON: POEMS © 2018 by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press. Used by permission of TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press.