poems from the heart

photo: Robert Schwarz, South Dakota

lying purple

All day you lay on my heart like a heavy green cloud over those wanton plains:

Stretched out in a yawn of arms that hold all the living things that run

In gold and green and a million oranges, splattered with blues

you would not imagine live in plains.

But they do, like grasshoppers the blues jump up covering your pant legs

And the wind keeps pulling your breath away. It pulls it from your chest

as though it could not breathe without your lungs to borrow.

I borrow your lungs on days like today, when you lay on my chest like a great cloud:

The weight of your rain, holding, holding…

I see it, I smell it: ozone lingering like a purple line behind my eyes.

The yellows are heavy with seeds, waiting to fall, and yet your rain holds.

Holds. Holds back… flying slowly over the arms stretched out to you.

The Sunflowers lean and look up at you, leaning one against another like small children,

shoulder to shoulder, holding one another down from flying off the earth

as they lay watching the cloud people fly.

You are not a cloud person, yet you linger up there, holding onto your rain.

Your paint all stowed in the heavy cans, and I can see your arms become thick as sailing ropes with

every gust you carry that paint…

And I see them when they start to tire, loosening in the constant wind.

Spill that great paint, heart and apple red.

We are all waiting.

streetart, seen @LittleItaly on #Mulberry

a red thing

When did woman ever lie down like a lamb?

For him to come along to collect…

Pull up into his arms…

Bring into his heart…

Make his own.

Yours, mine.

Us.

We roared from the beginning.

The trick is to purr before we roar.

Telling a Hard Love Story

Our hushing in the night, the sill jar-cracked just a sliver

To let the whispers escape like so many breezes into the night

Dispersed into leaves that hold secrets.

We handle roars so loud no one knows what they say,

And everyone around us closes their eyes light-tight to keep out the heat,

Covering their ears as though they could deny entrance to an earthquake.

Two poles, a coin tossed in the night, flashing and then falling

Cold and hard on rock:

A sound so flat, so sharp, you were not sure you heard it.

It was not music: there was no sound that came before, and none followed,

So one was not sure what one did or did not remember.

[That is how music works, wrapping itself around us in our memory:

we remember the sound even as it passes and what we feel.

Without that memory this sound now means nothing.]

The silver tick of your watch is not music either;

It counts out the beats of our time:

Hearts are infinite and do not wait for coins tossed up to land.