The Heart Does Not Turn to a Stone

“I have always wondered about the leftover 

energy, water rushing down a hill

long after the rains have stopped”

[Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), “For the Dead” 1972]

what we love persists,
a body once known remains,

hangs about,

                      like a veil of prophecy:

an open window moves the spirit

& all the bodies dance, voices sing

the sounds accumulate,

how moss  gathers,  

memory assimilates into a life.

if energy is conserved,

what happens to our vital potential

when the kinetic slumps, slows, & stops?

who’s to say that to die is to conform to friction,

might momentum simply be transferred?

(let us remain silent about ghosts.)

let the rain roll & the dark be broken

by the flash that reminds us:

night is not the end of blue,

only a temporary failure of vision.

what we love remains,

though bodies are removed

(as the rain steals the soil)

love softens all hearts

& nothing is taken

that is etched into cortex,

that settles like moss

on  the northernmost face

of a life well shared.

Two Poems

Allusion, Illusion, Delusion

“The joke, which we seldom see, is on us;

For only true hearts know how little it matters

What the secret is they keep…”

   [ Auden, “Secrets”]

There sits, now, a thing on my heart,

a secret not so much protected as denied:

that there’s a loneliness I crave, I dread.

Not that I have wasted my life, the part

though never the whole, but pretended

too much to ever be happy in public, alone.

This trick never works:

where you’re convinced

that walls papered with

rejection do not repeat

the words: thankfailure

you failureopportunity

failurefailfailureagain.

It was always dying.

Not in the way we all are:

of the cancer silently growing or a heart that breaks

or an accident no prophet would have predicted,

but because it was built on (at best) wishful thinking

& for the worst on willful pretense.

    So it goes.

Three Lives

“A handsome child is a gift from God,

And a friend is a vein in the back of the hand,

And a wound is an inheritance from the wind.”

[Robert Bly, “Living at the End of Time”]

Two lives are livable,

the third destroys.

What home allows,

though crowded,

small, & full of ghosts,

is a degree of self

that cherishes

truthfulness.

The constant gift

of anticipation,

a child provides

a lesson in honesty:

constant

growth is not

sustainable

but its opposite

is anathema

to god & to man.

**

What a friend adds is beyond measurement,

but in absence, constricts, like hand to fist.

Not in anger clenching, but so much riding on

compliment, supplement, affirmation & faith

there’s bound to be a point a bubble bursts.

Pride, insecurity, delusion & doubt:

the sacred secrets shared in kind:

But illusion crumbles so sure as grandeur grows,

aloofness follows & then:   renewal, respite, & reprieve.

***

Standing alone in a loud corner,

the awkward happiness of others

smothers any hopefulness

of the possibilities of the third life.

Two lives are livable:

there’s here & there’s there.

The looming life,

lived somewhere between

slowly destroys itself,

its false promises of acceptance,

the suggestions of fame

disintegrate (without ghost).

Sometimes it’s clear:

it’s just time to go back home.

The first life thrives through the wound.