Circles

The old man was feeling better today.
He had taken his tablets.
His heart palpitated with a more comfortable regularity than the
swollen sputtering that curdled his blood.

Each day
I could see the blankness of death in his daughter's face,
how the distance between her eyes widened,
and the length of her upper lip protruded
towards the ground.

Her face looked like a vast desert.

But the old man,
he smiled amusedly as his children debated the expensive maintenance of
his heart. His eyes twinkled as his wife,
his second,
pressed the aged veins around his arms.

The blood of his ancestors
ran in circles between his heart and his kidneys,
a journey of 80 years
and perhaps a few more.