A Cargo of Green Hearts
~POEMS~
I.
I am thinking of sorrow the big kind, the crawling on all fours through the dirt, the house of hammers. maybe there is such thing as light maybe it is spring somewhere else on the other side of the earth, or on a different earth. the cup is so familiar the distance, a blurred Polaroid. if I were a bear they'd shoot me. the sky is a severe hand, there is no sea to shipwreck honorably in. maybe you know this, or maybe it's just a whisper, a thing you turn up the music against. the thing about liferafts is they're built for one; the thing about desert islands is you share them with sand. II. I try to conjure my grandfather and grandmother in vain. the Ouija board tells me no one is home in the switchhouse of the dead. III. in my car the houses I pass look like unreal advertisements. I will orbit all night, arriving on the doorstop I set out from. IV. optimists don't kill themselves. we burn right here, under the eyes of a living god, reincarnated as goats or worse without having to die first. V. if, as Gibran said, Hell is governed by those who do not yield to fire, then am I a tourist? VI. tonight the crickets will make a bed for me from the black cloth of night, and a deer will circle me three times. if there is a moon it will look the other way. the least of my prayers-- for sleep, for sunrise-- will be enough; In the morning I will repeat them to make them stick. I am thinking of
blindness lately in all its forms-- the deprivation of color (more dear to me than time or pain) and of how the helplessly dead lie blind staring off into limitless soil. there is a lot to be said for the eyes, the alpha sense: let there be light, the wires that run from them to the heart, a sunset the face of one loved or the familiar rectangle of home after wandering abused and lost (a tale of how we suffered other forms of blindness too)-- but let me be clear: it would kill me to lose the light, I would rather set myself on fire. I am fine with loss of clarity suspecting I never had any, and what I took for it were knives, precipices-- prepared to let go that attachment the way Monet did, late in life, color, form smudged edgeless as scents, the way things truly exist before we pull them apart, before we imagine we are apart. the crickets fiddle out
their last let the dead prepare for more dead let the marrow feed the mice every frost- blanched leaf falls atop another leaf death stacked atop death even as stones are worn down down to sand to sea level. if you have lost a love, you will feel this, if you have buried hearts you will not be able to brush it off. don't say it doesn't matter, that blood isn't red, that you haven't wandered foolish, kissing factories, throwing stones at tombstones spilling your little cup of time. |
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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