"The Hearts."
I'll read "The Hearts" and a couple more.
And that probably will make a poetry reading of it.
This one is about the same length as The Figured Wheel,
I guess, and it's probably the kind
of thing Alison has in mind when she
talks about trying to make something productive out
of the movements of daydream.
"The Hearts."
The legendary muscle that wants and grieves,
the organ of attachment, the pump of thrills and troubles,
clinging in stubborn colonies like pulpy shore-life
battened on a jetty.
Slashed by the little deaths of sleep and pleasure,
they swell in the nurturing spasms of the waves,
sucking to cling.
And even in death itself, baked frozen,
they shrink to grip the granite harder.
"Rid yourself of attachments and aversions."
But in her father's Orchard, already, he says,
he'd like to be her bird.
And she says, "sweet, yes, yet I should kill thee
with much cherishing," showing that she knows already,
as Art Pepper, that first time he takes heroin,
already knows that he will go to prison
and that he'll suffer and knows he needs to have it or die.
And the one who makes the general lose the world for love
lets him say, "would I had never seen her."
but, "oh," says Enobarbus, "then you
would have missed a wonderful piece of work, which
left unseen, would bring less glory to your travels.
Among the creatures in the rock torn surf a wave of
agitation a gasp."
A scholar quips, "Shakespeare was
almost certainly homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual.
The sonnets provide no evidence on the matter."
He writes Romeo an extravagant speech on tears,
in the Italian manner.
"His teardrops cover his chamber window," says the boy.
He calls them crystals insanely and sings
them to Juliet with his heart.
The almost certainly invented heart, which Buddha denounces,
in its endless changes, forever jumping and moving,
like an ape.
"Over the poor ape's head, the crystal fountain
crashes illusions, the cold salt spume of pain
and meaningless distinction," as Buddha says.
But here, in the crystal shower, mouths are open to sing.
It is Lee Andrews and the Harts in 1957,
singing, "I sit in my room, looking out at the rain.
My teardrops are like crystals.
They cover my window pane."
The turns of these illusions we make become their glory.
To Buddha, every distinct thing is illusion,
and becoming is destruction.
But still, we sing in the shower.
I do.
In the beginning, God drenched the emptiness
with images, the potter cross-legged
at his wheel in Benares market, making mud cups.
Another cup each second tapering up
between his fingers, one more to sell the tea-seller
at a penny a dozen, and tea, penny a cup.
The customers smash the empties, and waves of traffic
grind the shards to mud for new cops in turn.
And I keep a cup here next to me,
holding it a while from out of the cloud of dust
that rises from the shattered pieces.
The risen dust alive with fire, then settled, and soaked,
and whirling again on the wheel that
turns and looks on the world as on another cloud, on everything
the heart can grasp and throw away as a passing cloud.
With even enlightenment itself another image
another cloud to break and churn a salt foam over the heart,
like an anemone that sucks at clouds,
and makes itself with clouds, and sings in clouds,
and cover its window pane with clouds that blur and melt,
until one clings and holds.
As once in the temple, in the time before the temple was
destroyed, a young priest saw us the seraphim of the Lord.
Each had six wings, with two they covered their faces,
with two they covered their legs and feet, with two
they darted and hovered like dragonflies
or perched like griffins in the shadows near the ceiling.
These are the visions, too barbarous for heaven
and to preposterous for belief on Earth,
God sends to taunt his prophet, with the truth
no one can see that leads to who knows where.
A seraph took a live coal from the altar and seared--
"God only knows the girl who will love me.
Oh, if we only could start over again."
Then the Hearts chant the chords again a final time, ah,
and the record turns through all the music and on into silence
again.