A Cargo of Green Hearts
~POEMS~
an old pain wakes me
memory of November the season that eats its own dead. a fingernail scribes something in the sky: " you are not long for this world." I know the red leaf will fall. my grandmother waits to lead me to the lake bottom where we will join the deathless frogs. when the ice comes we will polish its milky underside so that we can see the sun. I have become ordinary
but know the cure. the moon stands on the lake forming a silver dock the nightbirds have no name; they butter the air with their black paintbrushes. I once dreamed I’d killed a man and was afraid I’d been caught then woke, more relieved I was not caught than of murder. there is still a dead body in my skull. an ordinary victim who walked on water made of the moon someday he will die and it won’t be a dream and the night won’t be made of outer space but birds. I mumble my way through
the video job interview with people the size of postage stamps staring across a tiny desk at me. I respond, a little doll from another planet. something from Bukowski comes to mind about the absurdity of proving onself to an absurdly machined world. the sane world, mind you, is like leaves growing in a womb or like the sun pulsing in outer space. things like forests and the melting of ice just happen unjustified. a thing wants to grow and it does. a thing wants to shine and god says let there be light. but yeah, the interview: fuck. I’ve had better eviscerations. whatever befalls me, I keep falling back on the kiss which is supposed to save me. it never does but that’s not it’s purpose. I keep telling all of you: there are no reasons for it. it is the cause of everything else. For all I know they do
not exist, the spring peepers, because I have never seen one and may die before or because of it, as love, which I have heard most clearly in the dark, (sometimes-- the embaressment of it-- on all fours or on knees) but not seen and left to imagination filled all the holes the dark might dig grown mightier than its form, so that the sky could not contain it nor the heart, and both breaking as they may in rain or jaggedness saturated the earth and melted the last snow. Here, among this insistent new green I do not believe more than I did, forced to put faith in nothing surrounded by everything buried in the song. all my life, the wind
a robe, a battering full of reasons and sweeping reason away. no hats are safe. words are carried off, spit, body heat explanations. so often I hunkered in the tuckamore as it— a god in a locomotive derailed —swept hail to punish the soft valleys: would you rather have this? or death in a soft bed? all deaths are not equal as all loves are not; the rime grows into the wind, leaning in, growing the way we’re afraid to grow. in my life of catastrophes the wrack makes more sense, the straight branch is most suspect the raven’s black ash and mangled antiphony flag and anthem. when the fields are flat-ironed flat and the stove-piped lightning burns it’s reckless argent I dream of ruins and the ruined, of what full gods the destroyed worship. I would not give up the wind to save a life. I am telling you these things in the lull. when the lull ends my throat must become a wing. the world had seemed a prison
carpentered of dead sticks but at last the night’s tide subsided. I let all the doors fall from my face and owned the exhaustion of hard living in the heart’s attics. I admit my embarrassment of not having learned to play the guitar, of penning out these tiny poems on a rectangle of light, of limping. you remember the tale, the one about the man who stood as still as a tree until he became one. it’s not so bad to become what you truly love, even if you must give up the gift of praising it to be it. the Buddha said absolutely nothing in favor of enlightenment just pointed a single finger at the ground like a tree casting a root. in less than a century I’d already mastered the art of transformation and driving a car fast through the night. it’s not rocket science but anyone can convince themself right. admitting you’re wrong is another thing entirely— that you’ve not become what you love just had the right tongue for it. hold the whisky and don’t misunderstand me: i’m making an ocean-like sound in my throat. tell the vultures to get out of the way. I’m coming home with all my eyeteeth and preferably alive. the moon is full of fingernails
that scrape the earth to the bone a frozen branch is of the dead an unsounded zero I was woken by the rattling teeth of icicles and drew the quilt around my nose the bus stop down the road was deposited there from another planet I miss my home the previous line is thematically consistent the street lamps are trying my breath escapes me visually: a reminder hold me closer love the trees make me a ware of nudity sssssh. by convention I don’t give thanks in
November, month of dry bones and shattered doors. the month is a gravely long word and things are meant to be burnt in it for warmth or to shed weight. one cannot lug everything through winter and sometimes even children must be left behind. poems shall be burned for the sake of fingertips— burned unread. if there is a time for accepting that the dead are actually gone it shall be covered in broken sticks with a beard of frost. unlike Christ it will become part of the earth and remain so. it is a test. let me be grateful in the spring if I am still human. the fall visited me again
this year, as it said it would as everyone said it would. I went on being a vacant star among the denuded maple branches. shirking my duty to generate light. get lost, I said to the navigators fuck all of you. before the druids built their alchemic stone playgrounds there were no seasons; the snow was a thing and so was a blade of grass. you could see them together if you liked, lying down like lion and lamb. there was no need to shiver, to walk off into the biting dark. since then everything has been pulled apart, forced to live in separate apartments. if I am not whole in speech and being the clocks are to blame. there was a time when time didn’t matter—when the sun shone whenever you wanted it to. I was fortunate to have a pocket full of pebbles then— no one to tell me they were not gold. these and similar thoughts occur to me when I am far from the memory of home. glaciers through the
valley poured cold muscle rounding it so that water could slide through sans thought. we mimic the artistry when making little human things sometimes approximated with grace more often jumbled and smashing things jealous as children. we don’t really know time or the heart we climb these peaks as if we could rise out disasters we have made by exertion alone. wind haunts us. lifts our souls a little. reminds us where the kite strings are attached. and in storms: what it would take to break them. |
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
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