A Cargo of Green Hearts
~POEMS~
I am thinking this morning
of all the bridges I burned in this short life—the human ones of course: in the heart’s warehouse of regrets bricks and steel float like feathers but words sing like dropped anvils, piercing calls, like those of lost hawks. our hearts, I think, are more readily made to forgive others than ourselves; the dead don’t come back in familiar form they wear new masks but speak old words we should recognize but too often don’t. if only we were like the trees: in death giving back all to whatever we had choked and shaded the light out of a green laughter running over our toppled backs. and the boat shall right
itself in the current and drift downstream. and the trees will float their manyjointed arms on the wind. the dead shall rest at last, blanketed in the earth’s green bedsheets. cows drift homeward; they looks like ships coming to harbor in the dusk. summer rests its chin on the continent and dozes for a month. those who have made love fall into each other’s arms and sleep the sleep of cats. Durga, you have ways of shutting down all this motion. when I come home I am whistling, and time is abundant enough to recline on. the storm moves off
with its yellow pitchforks of light. it had combed the fields for hours as if to expose fugitives snagging the hair of the trees, beating the earth clean with wet fists. it takes a certain kind of person to love this weather. outside, an old woman is picking sticks from her yard. a bird chirps uncertainly. when you kiss my shoulder I can feel your teeth. I.
the wind moves its corrugated fingers through the trees carrying the air’s messages which, without wind, would be dead letters, poems spoken in closets, irredeemable flowers. to wait in the wind is to wait to be brought everything: stormwrack, pollen eagles, lightning, snow with a skin- flattening cold, death, surely; the clouds parting their stern lips to utter a syllable of light. memories, too, so like October leaves the incompletion of trees the lost green words that you once said but have since forgotten. II. I am thinking too, of the way we are blown from thing to thing through time’s finite doors pushed as if by planetary forces. in some dreams we wear the wing-jackets of shamans. in nightmares, we shuffle through gutters like paper cups. meanwhile, the trees largely endure; the falcon draws his mottled knife and cuts; the clouds resurrect from thin air. he who sees through the air’s plain disguise to the source of all the pushing learns the value of standing sideways. III. I crawled across Humpback Mountain in April. I was in my mid twenties. the trunks of oaks barked and whined; the birds had fled to their invisible planets; the winter-spared grass flattened itself horizontal proving even the dead are subject to nature. I was afraid, briefly but laughed about it later. maybe I bragged some. it was beautiful to have endured, and terrible as if some part of me for an instant, was told I had no right. the wind often lies like that; one has to test it to be sure, and therein lies the rub. IV. as a child, tormented by coat-hangers I believed I could summon storms; I desired them. I had not been introduced to Lear yet, but years later would instantly relate. how the blind lead the mad, and the mad mine the air for stovepipes of lightning —but even the wise will walk toward destruction in order to be rearranged. V. but like the mad or wise I have often wandered into the White Mountains above the demarcation of saleable timber where the wind chokes the life out of civilized sound and the lulls are a crenelated silence broken only by a tumbled pebble the mountain shrugs from its shoulder. I could easily spend a season among the rime-flayed krummholz to which the wind has grafted its contortions. and to myself: at times softly peppered by a glancing kiss of moisture or savaged to granite until I corkscrew myself into a fissure and persist in the habits of a vole. at night there are sudden partings as if the clouds have blinked and the sequined stars drop so soundlessly they must disbelieved to be believed and there are mornings where the fog holds me in a gentle glove of whispers that permit me to stop hating time. in the end it is always the lulls and silences that give me heart, and in them I could wait until the frost jacks the felsenmeer to splitting and only the warmth of a loving word will turn me home. VI. I am imagining a world made entirely of wind in which one may fall or blow forever. and how the body bereft of more material touch would become as sensitive as a phonograph to the barest of gestures. let me go there and return vibrating like a piano wire, my heels barely touching earth. even in the ruin of time
somehow the world goes on carrying its old gravity around a star that may have adopted us by choice or by chance we will never know but here is our small compartment on earth we bear our choices as if branded: to love or not, to be tender or selfish to step out of our doors and feel the rich grass squeak under our feet or to bury ourselves in dark closets that smell of old shoe leather. all except for time which we cannot choose which runs ahead of us then, one day unexpectedly runs out, our feet dangling in the temporal air, where we will wish if only for an instant for another choice. listen friend,
the world from afar is little more than a blue star a little gas lamp. outer space is filled with crows or worse; strange energies swish their robes at the daylight. yet we are held and the dreaming goes on. a kiss is so fragile a thing against it all; a kiss then and of course another for good measure. 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
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