A Cargo of Green Hearts
~POEMS~
in the mornings of my days
with you, I am gloriously normal. my head remains connected to my body. the colors all stay attached to their respective things: blue to sky. orange to orange your skin is freckled brown which is also of the earth. we suspect even the long- lost color of breath will any day slink back through the yard like an old cat. I am waking to the smell of toast and the crepuscular hiss of the coffee maker. light leaks into the world through its windows and valves. I will know what to do with my arms and lips, a simple recipe which never grows old even as the cook does. we get tired of our own reflection in water-pots but the stainless steel soup ladle will shine through an apocalypse. I am remembering how in an old life I jumped off rooftops with daisies between my teeth. the roads were new and thrown down everywhere; pedestrians were outlawed outright. I dismantled things efficiently and ate off countertops. there wasn’t a plate in the house. ‘okay,’ I said when you asked, ‘but I’m not giving up on my sadness.’ all the stars in were listening and winking. ‘we don’t have to trade’ the world said. ‘there is a little house for your sadness right here in this house.’ meanwhile an albatross was trying to lift my head into the sun. ‘not yet,’ I said. ‘even the useless parts are welcome here. when we made our pact years ago, there was no need for the ground. but I have found another way, bird, and at last my toes are in agreement with me.’ dad, I understand the madness that drove you
out the door when I was four. I too was not enough for the world with my face of smashed lightbulbs and the way that doors fled from me out in the fields. I could never run fast enough to keep up; my knees lacked ambitions and the greased doorknobs were hateful. they slammed themselves to splinters in rage. is it any wonder that the trees with their long, vertical tolerance took me in and the silence made room for me in the pit of its old green arm. that I found stars more familiar than faces and in the unravelling of my tongue it was like kissing a desert. you would never be good enough for us and knew it, dad. your motorcycle trail was a box of horizons. your face was like a little sliver of the moon, not the whole pie. don’t worry dad, I have done well. have gone on to be an olympiad stumbler. have shook hands with holes in the ground. have climbed up pines and bedded down fetally in the nests of eagles, dreaming off limits. have breathed long and slow when the trains arrived without holding my breath. have shown mercy to all living things like you have. they say I am the saint of baby birds and road-kill toads. you would be proud, dad. when the buckshot stag ribboned out its guts across my yard in the velvety night, I did not call anyone for help. I too am useless beyond a simple kindness, a shrugged sympathy. no one practices that anymore, dad. the world has taken out stock in Band Aid. no one would dare watch the stag die now. hold its inhuman head in their lap and stoke it like a strange infant. the prairie crocus burns
a hole in the late snow with its lavender eye. I am grown weary, covered by words. let me go, I said. and they lugged my body and a gallon of gas up the oak-darkened hill in the middle of April. 1.
unfuck the cockeye-hinged door paint scabbed as an old birch torso the house that people forgot to live in the house only the crude dead remember with their minds of torn sheets, set the windows again wide with light in which the curtains again shall come to roost dovelike unannounced and return the clatter of dishes at suppertime the fork dropped to ting like a bell the full stomach, the horseshoe over the leaning sill righted so that it can run on hooves, forever 2. also unfuck the trees of which we made pencils and toilet paper with which to write and wipe away or burned in a pyromaniacal binge let the ash and splinters transmigrate to heartwood, the old leaves sail from the ground by gravity delinquent to adorn branch tip delicately as bee-tongues let each bough at last reach its final wish, to snag a star in its trellises like a dragonfly caught in hair let the trees, the tall green sea of them climb over this old earth like slow contortionists and crush the metallurgy of unreason comparatively as St John was promised by a stern God but altogether in a different way 3. unfuck the bulleted schools the red-bloomed chalkboards resurrect the floor splattered unintelligibly in strawberry milk or if you will in brains (there are no good ways to say certain things, drink your milk fellow countrymen, eat your strawberries by the pint), realign the awkwardly scattered lunchboxes, let blood flow back into the body’s deflated carton let the students drift backwardly into the orderly desks in measurable rows with measurable limbs and grades, let the yellow tape fall from doorways and the alphabet return to order: the pointy tent of the A preceding the B of breasts which contain hearts that in turn necessitate the H and so forth the Z at the end like a lightningrod the O buffered in the middle like a tender egg laid down in a safe sea . . .but also, and for good measure, unfuck the fucker who shot for he is Most Fucked Of All, salvage his square head from the barren shoals of claustrophobic civilization, lift him like a gull, give him a meadow, a kiss he is deserving I say but if you do not agree cast him like a match into the orange eye of the sun which, beyond madness, loves everything it incinerates even death. 4. unfuck the catastrophic word the devil-made slander that ate at the table and stole the butter knives sharpening them in secret restrooms wallpapered in Russian tabloids and secondhand art, replete and out of toilet paper and while at it unfuck the media-addled mind, throttle jammed on serotonin fattened to obesity on Likes and Friends let the Void replace them with the wholesale tenderness of nothing and the silent sails of the night which go nowhere and can’t be seen even by the clairvoyant let the mind empty like a syringe and go hungry like a beggar savant, door to door searching for real bread and real water eschewing saccharine and styrofoam-like holy wafers 5. and so on with such lists. but let the dead pass on uninterrupted and let the dying do their due diligence of dying and the sorrowful their due diligence of tears for though the sky may be mended by the ozone needle threaded in azure and hummingbirds and the ravaged be made whole by the vindicating light of repurposed cathedrals, not everything should be without suffering old friend who comes to hug us at midnight so that we dream fitfully a litany of reversals lost on the road of all restful sleep |
Poetry LogPoems are posted here when I'm ready to share them. I often don't title my poems. The date you see above the poem may be the date it was posted here and not necessarily the date it was created. To see more, click on the Archives below. Archives
January 2020
CategoriesUnless otherwise noted, all content ©Paul-William Gagnon, Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-NoDerivs license.
|