Heart: so that you may return

Listening to Beirut, thinking about my old chapbook.

For Lisa Spaar's Intermediate Poetry class last semester we had to construct a chapbook focusing on a specific place of interest. I was taken aback by this project since I had never considered the "poetics of space" (as the course was titled, well thought-out of me to choose it, no?). Poetry for me has never been a thing of place, but rather a thing of people, object, and relations deftly wrapped in concise phrase. I can't really explain it; I have a feeling I will be trying to explain poetry to myself and to others for my entire life.

Anyhow, the previous poem I put up "First Intimacy" was the first poem I wrote for Lisa, and it was the start of my chapbook. That poem and this poem, "Heart: so that you may return" are my favorites of the whole chapbook. They serve as  the collection's "bookends": the former the head and the latter the tail.

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Heart: so that you may return

Shh. Enter soft  

and extinguish light.

Tonight you return to the cratered ground, 

back, back through the kitchen knife exit  

of the cantaloupe sliced, the emptied core. 

Sight has no place in this familiar black 

and the light switch far far in the back, 

let us never, never again touch that. 

In here we fill our darkened universes, 

those spinning plates, our revolutions  

will sync again. Tonight you ease gentle 

into the lightless space and I will be waiting, 

feet set shoulder-width apart, I will be waiting. 

Tonight you return, and at the shadowed door,  

the wind will be my breath, a moist inhalation. 

At the doorframe, the light falling in like snow, 

innocence, it too will melt in here. Step in, 

and the fibrous ground will spring back. 

Amazonian topsoil, last season’s canopy 

is a silent rug, waiting. Shh. Just for tonight,  

lie down again. Familiar? The shedded foliage, 

a leprosy, the blossoms fell wet upon farewell, 

this gangrene ground, too heavy, begs fire.  

Lie down. You have come to set no fire, 

just lie down. Listen. Tonight, all the heart  

is music and flames, this air will quiver,  

this light will burst, and these walls,  

these walls will pound again.

3:06 AM--June 8, 2010