Tag: heart

tour of the interior

wear galoshes

Enter anywhere you like. Doors line trick walls, retracting roofs, fallaway floors. Aerial pads, underground tunnels—each in some state of readiness for guests.

The place is under perpetual construction, crowded and damp. Leaks drip from every seam, so bring galoshes, not dress shoes. No formal affairs here. And though it’s wet, you’ll still need extra water for the heat.

Why come at all? Many arrive tired, unsure they can continue out there. Stay as long as you like. Art and music are scattered everywhere: prayer cards, crayon drawings, kitsch beside relics.

Characters roam—escaped saints with haunted eyes and wild humor if you get them talking. Leave them alone, and they seem freshly returned from some dark night of the soul.

You’ll find huddled masses here, but also divas—ancient figures with jeweled hair and hand-stitched clothes—who survey the chaos and sigh. Couldn’t we sweep, add lights, host a proper feast now and then?

The real joy comes from otters, birds, and babies: downy hatchlings, tiny hands slapping water, the gleam of a pup riding its mother’s belly. Cats, too, offer wry humor and disdain for our grievances.

One wing belongs to Klee’s angels. Walter Benjamin mutters through his notes while others drift in and out—some long dead, some not yet born. Lists of names dissolve as fast as they’re written.

In a far corner, unnoticed creatures nap: a dingy unicorn, withered lion, small dragon, chimera. A harpy perches nearby, cracking bawdy jokes around an unlit cigar.

The gift shop is closed. The food court changes with mood and season. No ID, no admission fees, no security.

Resentments fester like gangrene, fur and hair matted in corners. I mean to clean, but it’s tiring—feeding all these guests who never leave.

notes from a reading

in the shade near the back of a crowded room

Why does the performance poet so often sound like the caricature of a self-proclaimed poet? I suppose this is something that happens in the act of proclaiming so much and at such volume in that outfit. This one calls himself by a word that is three adjectives stitched together, each of which might have been lifted from the stickers of a 1980s grade school Trapper Keeper ™. It isn’t @zippydippycool, but you get the idea. I do not like noticing these things with such profound embarrassment. Doing so only reminds me that whatever it is that one is supposed to be very excited about, I am not. And that my heart, which may sometimes retract in shock to a mean and stingy artifact of itsownself, is usually on the verge of brimming way beyond expected confines, so I spend most remembered moments of this one life trying to pass as one whose heart and everything else is not so often leaking. Meeting mostly failure, with many humorous exceptions that never fail to surprise me, as when someone remarks (as someone often does) on my apparent calm. Which may explain the aversion here, as perhaps only the complement to a fondness for the dull-seeming ones with no names who do not wear any outfits but go on in a deliberate way, careful not to show themselves too much and scare everybody off, unseen and unproclaiming, especially when it comes to knowledge of what it is that is going on––here, and here, and also––do you hear that thing in the background, which is nowhere? I feel it coming closer all the time.

Holler

From an undersea expanse.

It started above ground. Then we

worked the present’s peace, as

the storm and life went on until

the whole story was underwater.

The lens moved to track the current,

the coral, its choral lives. The lens

was intelligent. It saw us. We

looked back, our entire lives

before us, now beyond speech,

the brave vessels of our knocking

hearts still moving by the word. 

We held new names inside us,

hinting at what we were and to

what we were being returned. 

Down we went. At last, 

there was no time before this

but our remembrance, and some

would make trespass of memory

holding it close, would hear its

first utterance in the water, like

Mother            even now, in

this constant dusk the day 

still breaking in my––– 

But she said:

                        Hush,

don’t speak to me of

souls. Not here, at this

late hour. Only hold.

Electricity and Magnitude

The knowing unknowing of stormy hearts.

The Doctor says, look at these images, notice the noise and chaos at the heart, the lacy kinks of energy, bubbling near the buzz at the center.

What’s buzzing?

A black hole with the mass of four billion suns. 

[                               ]

What are these glowing filaments around it? 

Each is a hundred light years across, the Doctor explains. Then leaves.

What does a body on this planet even make of a century of light years?

––rather, this body. I suspect cats already understand, along with whales.

In my case, there’s an instinct to set the idea aside, like I do with some mail I don’t intend to open. How about a cat’s eye nebula, or even the eye of Jupiter? Violent storm that it is, at least someone can point to it and say “there,” pretending to wear knowledge like a child playing dress-up in costume jewelry.

But there it is again, this veiled center, this electrical storm not unlike the beating of a heart, a sound we prefer to imagine as gentle and distant, a low murmur, like the now-dated images of galaxies as soft clouds of distant jewels and floating lights, swirling in slow motion like the mobile above an infant’s crib. 

***

Inspired by (and borrowing phrases from) this article in yesterday’s New York Times:  An Electrifying View of the Heart of the Milky Way

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