Indulgence’s Reward
You will cut the name
out of your brain,
your heart will complain.
You will shed tears
then return to empty pages
that fill you with words
as if they were sons and daughters.
You will shed words
like old coats
and they will grow cold
without a body.
You are not a prophet,
just practiced in good-byes,
impaled upon the sword
of this world whose love
turns a knife in its own heart.
Not Like This Heart
These bones are corn stalks in late harvest.
Bristling the field,
They are bleached, scrubbed
But you can’t call them clean.
They hang in the closet
But you can’t call them skeleton.
These bones may be losing themselves
But they scream louder than yesterday’s spring.
They demand a thinner coat
But they have never been broken—
Not like this heart.
It split apart in early spring
One late summer.
Cleaved to a youthful brain that cannot
Dream of all those things in adult philosophy.
It had no star, no light to guide its stitch work.
But it patched itself valve by valve until
The chambers seemed matched and pumped again.
But every beat wobbled and sputtered.
It would spit in the face of a surgeon
Who tried to regulate it.
Its scars show that time’s friendship
Is, indeed, medicine.
. . .
This poem appears in my collection titled Turtle Woman & Other Poems under the title “These Bones”—available on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle.
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