the heart

It has been days since I have written anything from my own heart, because sometimes the heart is hazy and difficult to reach. Or perhaps it is just pulsing there, and does not want to be articulated. It only wants to pump blood through the body, to keep the mechanism moving forward. Too much has been asked of you all this time, dear heart. What other part of us is expected to not only sustain life, but also to dress it in meaning and warmth and wonder? It is a big task for so small a lump of tissue.

Sometimes it seems I am nothing but a big pulsing heart. A heart on a sleeve, a bleeding heart. I am too sensitive for this world. I have been warned of this since childhood. I used to say you can never be too sensitive, but there is a weariness that comes. This is the kind of day when I would prefer taking action to feeling everything so acutely. My skin feels tender. This rain-kissed midsummer world full of birdsong and rustling leaves is too beautiful to bear. The half-begun fall garden is a swatch of reddish-brown clay cut out of the green lawn. It whispers: "Why don't you build something here? Why carve out this much only to let it lie weed-choked and fallow?"

Half a heart is all I had for that garden. There were very old claims laid on the rest--as old as mother, father, brother, sister. I have never been good at accomplishing many things in a day.

The strange simulacrum that is my professional world tugs, too. A client refuses to pay a humble amount for my work, and it feels personal. I am a ghost because I do not want to entangle my writing with my ability to support myself. I also believed that not attaching my name to the words I string together would protect the ego. But the ego just got pricked, and sharply.

All of which should serve as a reminder that the ego is only a constructed thing, and has nothing at all to do with who or what I am made of. For of course, that part of me which is most sincerely me, the part that tells the story, the part that might make you feel warm if you were to sit near me...that is all bound up in this straining and miraculous bundle of bloody muscle over which, right now, for comfort, I place a hand.

bundles

A lifetime bundles itself in clusters
of two or three years, delineated
by walls of various houses and
what happened there.
What images were projected
upon them: the shadow-shape
of a certain dog, or the edge
of a support beam meeting the porch floor.

You live somewhere. You see
these things, but you do not notice them.
Hundreds or millions of times your eyes pass,
your secret memory storing each pass away
for later, when you will need to remember this place.
Each grazing of the gaze a stretch of thread
in the spool.

And of course there are those things that define
the perimeters of the year bundles:
a smell that was there, a sound that travelled past.
wild spearmint growing at the back door,
the sweep of cars down the road. the traffic light
switching from green to yellow to red. and the things
your love tended in those years to talk about.
your rituals around getting ready for bed at night.

The subtle trick of time is in each second passing. To notice
this would drive us mad. Yet there it goes.
And again.
All that is behind falls further behind and an end
grows closer. Again, now, gone. Again.

So it is that we can only catch time, hold it--
spin it before us--
in the form of memory. In memory, we can
still its indifferent motion.

A lifetime bundles itself in clusters. Of years,
not more than two or three.
Look back.
The edges are there,
plain as the day.