A Cargo of Green Hearts
~POEMS~
I was never so happy
as when I shattered on your green edge loosening all the birds from their moorings on the south pole. the frogs vibrated in their mud-beds and the trees waited to be exonerated. I heard a distant song and couldn’t help but cry like a guitar string even though I have always been weeping and so little has come of it. some of us are born into that occupation immune to nothing but silence. I myself have collected skulls from the tulip beds and have parsed the turkey vulture drifting like a sheet of burned paper. things change except for that. when you told me you loved me I said I would do anything and stomped on the ice like I meant it. it doesn't matter if you didn't. there are days I feel polluted by
concrete, destroyed by nails, by right angles. the sea is making a faraway sound like an injured bird. the airports have deposited their cargo of wheelchairs and eye sockets. the poets these days are cynics who’ve abandoned the word love. they are jigsaw puzzles with jack-fit faces. the sky lies down upon it all with a crushing sympathy. at once I am running to your face among the clouds like horses. your blue shoulder flows into your blouse. your eyes lamp the floor of the sea. profiled, the slope of your nose points the secret way, the one that can’t be seen straight-on, so that the ambitious won’t find it and be permitted to land. they must fly forever and never touch the earth’s breast. they must eat swords of air. the ripe peach shall never be theirs. only the smallest of birds may descend the ones with magnets the size of their heads and implicit songs. up in the sky a million miles from the earth your face is as large as the sun and I am not lost, I am constantly arriving. through this sacrifice I am allowed to love you. you must not imagine
a seriousness, an equation. love is a platypus. everyone will tell you “hoax” the one word that hell whispers at heaven over and over. the heart is a wilderness. don’t judge those that have gone there and have come back. they are talking like birds, in whistles, like the old ones did in the half lit fields before the ambulances came. maybe someday you’ll be told the dead circle back or have never really departed or that time is just a hair caught in our eyes. in Japan, zen-master Dōgen smashed wild things over the vases of heads. sufis will shit on the sofas of unbelievers: “fertilize this desert!” the truth is, we choose what to believe: the credulity of a duck’s bill on an otter’s body is a small price to pay for a kiss. I still go mad some days
in the way of the wasp-stung mare who remembers the whip to shock from hoof-flindered stable from piss-sot hay through the snarled wood shunning trail, all things poisoned-straight by men to the secret meadow shaped like a torn jacket long-tainted by twilight, by dandelions by the taste of a twice- trusted kiss. it’s enough to have got
this far, truant from the dust. the sea’s uneven gravity, the way the horizon wraps me in its orange sail. I am misunderstanding Itself but the sun shines through my thin ribs. it’s the light that blinds them and I’m not responsible for that. I long since stopped wearing the shirts they made for me; no offense to the Monkey King but my path is different when I bow my whole body dissolves. I’ve died on the floor and will again. when the sea takes me at last no one will notice. the sand will never stop. someday her hand will arrive reckless and green and I’ll be gone. I am not a servant, I’m her beloved don’t talk foolishly to me as if there is no difference. sometimes the snow
reminds me of loss how it blurs the silhouette and takes what it takes into its long white mouth the way our memory of the dead or abandoned are blurred to imagination taken from us or neglected by us and not unlike the longing of a vacated chair left askew, as if it should hold something again the shape of a hip or a sigh but doesn't. I.
because I am so sad and ordinary my eyes brown like common nuts I go down to the river at midnight to bathe hoping to take on a little sheen from the moon maybe, and glisten. II. it is an ordinary thing perhaps, to be told we are loved but it is extraordinary to believe it. the nesting owlets open their sickled beaks and are fed. again the sun is tossed into the air at 5am and the phloem of trees flutes water into the leaves that wave thankfully over this rare earth daughter to a common star. we wake up believing we won’t live but we do, proving that even the dead haven’t left us and the light is truly ours. III. I will take the word into my mouth and repeat it the way the holy and mad can’t help themselves from reciting. and in exchange I will not die slowly. IV. I am ordinary but in this light the entire world is silver. dear world, I am sorry I did not believe that you left me here to live. I.
I am thinking of the going of things of the eventual tiger of love of the disappearance of certain trees or all trees. there is an ocean of things that went and can't ever be got back not if we prayed hard and skun our knees doing it like the moa like the mammoth like the dripping minutes like unmouthed words the relentless passing and eventual forgetting threshold of the Place of Lost Things-- what the old mapmakers were thinking when they marked the End of the World on their beige parchment and trembled like malarial surgeons-- II. which I would like to visit, and get lost in myself among the mysterious dead among the old stone walls that run on to the moon among the dreams devoured by breakfast among gods we invented or murdered by way of my feet tracking beaches cobbled in missing pennies. III. to build a kind life there among the Gone which is limitless and unsubmitting to further time and not lament the world of the Present and Accounted with its long list of Things That Shall Exist each with its little check-box, each with its little expiration date. there was a time
when I would pluck a star out of the sky and place it on your head it would singe my fingers a little, it was smaller than I imagined as wonderful as a seed. these days my giving is more generous and consists entirely of pointing: look at the cardinal burning a hole through the trees look, how the moss slouches heavy against the northsides leaning away from confusion, look here, the blueberry, ripe, generous as water and the water without end strewn everywhere (look! look!) as if by chance if you can imagine no other cause a constellation of miracles yours for the taking (including the small parenthetical of my heart) if you’ve mastered the language of yes. when I was a little confused
I was most irredeemable but when truly lost my body blown out upon the stones of it — whatever betrayal whatever crushing rectangle, whatever assassinated bird-- I’d found I’d returned to the old room of my heart to discover all the doors unlocked as if no one had ever left home, and the illumination coming through the windows, tender, as in morning or before evening, the to-ing and fro-ing hours of life and living creatures and electrons my bed still there, a bare patch of ground by the woodstove —simple but worn soft through suffering-- a cup of tea, still hot the writing desk (waiting like a butler) from which I have always been able, before nightfall, to compose a poem and die and in dying, the words like a coin placed between my lips, awaken. |
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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