All I want to do all winter is read poetry.

And talk about the city jail, where I’m ushered into a room with bolted-down tables and fixed chairs, with a crowd of jumpy teenagers. We are locked in. There’s a huge warehouse window in the room; it’s bolted, too. The boiler on the roof below sends steam billowing up. It gets dark but I still see the steam. It’s a freezing night, and the radiator against the wall is hot. The boys ask me if it’s going to snow.

A yellowed papyrus, a long hall in the Metropolitan Muesum of Art on a snowy Saturday, New York.

Behind the plexiglass, Anubis adjusts the scales. The goddess Maat sits in the pan on the right. Her body is tiny and indistinct, and a feather rises from her head. One the other side is the heart. At this moment, jackal-headed Anubis still holds the balance. He has sharp ears and empty almond eyes, a flattened torso and the stiffened legs of Egyptian art. Soon, he will let go and the balance will shift, the heart against the feathery goddess, the heart a witness to the life it sustained.

Three thousand years later, I walk into a room where a man is dying. He sleeps in a bed on the seventh floor of an urban hospital, his face and arms positioned toward the winter sunlight that falls in rectangles on his sheets. I know nearly nothing about illness or health. Decisions are discussed and not made. I wait.

I know little more about the heart. It fills two cupped hands. When cut open, its walls are shockingly thick. The valves between the chambers are like parachutes, anchored to the inner wall by the heartstrings. The heart itself is wrapped in coronary arteries and cardiac veins, a self-supply of blood to the great writhing muscle. In life, the heart is a lightning storm of electrical impulses racing and slowing over the surface of the organ, through the thickest layers of myocardium. The muscle contracts in symphony. The valves open and the sea of blood rushes in, then they shut against the swell.

In death, the storm ceases, the heart attains its final weight, and the jackal-headed god takes measure.