How My Heart Behaves

My heart goes wandering in the woods for months at a time

looking for God and suits of armor.

She gets returned to me after the harsh winter by simple villagers

in cloth tunics.  She is half-starved and torn-lipped.

The villagers eye her frazzled hair and broken back suspiciously.

They don’t trust anything that old

capable of surviving that much exposure in the wild.

 

I don’t trust her either.

I build fences.

I draw lines.

I separate friendship from infatuation,

love, from addiction

but the old woman is spry.

Her varicose, sunken legs jump higher than you might think

and there she goes

across the wheat field of my breast and into the blue

she gets out of shotgun range before I’ve learned your name

 

She always comes back,

stumbling or dragged by the villagers,

with that chagrined look that says ‘you know I’ll just do this to you again’

 

I think the old lady prefers the bitter taste of lost adventure

how roots and berries aren’t really a meal

and leaves fall just short of being pillows

the way hunger crouches in her stomach and whispers

you are alive

you are a living thing

if death can finger your hand

and covet your body

then you must be full of sight and breathing

 

And who says I’d have the guts to pull the trigger anyway?

at least my heart isn’t young and beautiful

anything but that

to be led to the slaughter like a blind child

brushing on the rouge for your own funeral

saving the undertaker the trouble

 

I’ll take my old lady

she leaps into the claws of the wild bears that roam here

meets their snapping jaws with her rotting teeth

She is so stupid

but she does it on purpose

and at the end of the day

after months of bushes scratching at her arms

after reaching seriously advanced stages of pneumonia

and telling her arthritis to go f**k itself

she comes back to me

 

probably just to keep me from forgetting how ugly her face is,

but she pulls out a rocking chair

and a dirty romance novel

to watch the sunset over the rippling wheat

she knows it will keep growing

even in her absence.

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[TLK]

probably just to keep me from forgetting how ugly her face is,

but she pulls out a rocking chair

and a dirty romance novel

to watch the sunset over the rippling wheat

she knows it will keep growing

even in her absence.