Chopin’s Heart
June 25 2006

When I read this, I just happened to have a CD of Chopin playing. So I couldn’t resist! And it made me think of these bizarre cults of veneration and preservation: the mystical force attributed to pickled body parts!


I read that Chopin’s heart is kept in Cognac
in a crystal urn
in the Church of the Holy Cross.

While a grotesque Lenin floats in a vat of formaldehyde,
his puffy face
flattened-up against the glass.
And didn’t they preserve Mao,
his bloated form decomposing in some air-conditioned crypt
— the ultimate indignity.
Hitler, we are reassured, was crushed in his bombed-out bunker;
but rumours persist he was whisked away to Argentina
where he yet may live,
a stooped old man, tending his precious vines.

So in 1849
they still believed the heart contained man’s essence,
his courage
his soul.
And here is Chopin
stripped-down to his essentials
immune to time,
still toasting us
with fine French wine.
While the others are impostors and idols,
their preservation
a desperate denial of death,
their display
an obscene veneration of evil.

Chopin was dead at 39,
a short magnificent etude of a life.
His body long ago returned to earth;
but the heart is pure,
and the music
immortal.