A Cargo of Green Hearts
~POEMS~
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. night, I am listening to
the way you tiptoe around my bed and cast your spell on the exhausted land. I'm lying awake waiting for you to say something wicked or to whisper me the secret that erases the orange face of the day. eventually you'll win and fold your blanket of eyelids over me. I've been trying to trick you for fifty years: just once, to catch you winking. November deranges me but by December
I am ready to really die not just ram my face through a window it’s a transition, a kind of lycanthropy how madness reaches out to exhaustion and exhaustion to silence and silence with its old man’s face opens the door to the garden on the south side of the house that the talkers and thinkers can’t find. there is a key, and that key is the moon and whatever it does to you to get you to open your mouth and spit out the hornets. Fall is a good time for it. the shadows put their burly shoulders to the wheel. time to fire the lawyers and stop pretending: you can’t avoid the charge of insanity if your goal is to cut off your head and place it beneath your feet. be calm love.
don’t stop singing. true, it’s the season of Neptunian winds and disorderly zeros and yet someone is lighting a fire not the metaphorical kind but the flame itself, someone is cooking dinner and there are hands on the line-- laundry line that is, not the golden chain that pulls the damned from hell. someone must keep doing these things and fall in love with the small. don’t pretend they don’t have meaning, that the low singing can’t hold a tune. even the heart, vast redness which we ascribe all our super powers to moves like a bee in the dark meadow of our chests, an ordinary bee, humming to an ordinary task. I have grown tired of words
imagine that, me, a poet it’s true, have had my fill-- don’t think evilly of me it’s not like we’re starving between breaths not like we are not so full of them our brains don't outweigh our hearts not like we have not devoured them like potato chips been force-fed them and gagged on them as if on dogmeat or worse not like the words do what we tell them too anyway unruly things full of dangerous objects like the slippery S of insinuations or the jagged I prone to impaling-- seriously, goddamn that I and the horse it rode in on-- no, we’re lacking nothing in the Sentence Department the Bureau of Statements we’re so full of them they’re leaking into outer space polluting the silence of the moons, bouncing back radioactive as a rotten sun’s mind and the trees, who do well enough sans adjectives, shiver. I’m searching for a new language that doesn’t require them, an essay of pure, tactile devotion, a species of love, speaking of which, yes I could never wrap my tongue completely around. |
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.
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