A B(roke)n Heart

A B(roke)n Heart

                                                --imagine

we could mend

whatever we heard fracture:

splintering of wood, a bird’s

cry over still water, a sound

only reaching us now.

               

                                                Fragment 2

                                                Kathleen Jamie

while you are fogged in and dying you are sorting through 

all the seeds you've been finding and drying almost your entire 

life: idle in their spaces until now, sometimes for years and years

between moves, they stay at rest, like a sat horse

and rider come up to the top of some vista and out

goes their breath and over the edge and into

every entire thing, every future every past stem and root.

Just looking and breathing before the long

journey on.  I tell myself not to look into all that

space, I know exactly what gives me vertigo, like hiking

too close to the wall on one side of me and the cleaver

edge on the other and shit if it isn’t cliché

to say don’t look down or don’t look straight up but

how the fuck am I going to know where

I put my toe if I don’t at least…but that’s not

the same kind of vertigo as lying next to someone

who’s about to die and you don’t know they are

and they’re just on the corner of waking up because the snow’s been

falling and it needs to be pushed out of the way or scooped

and carried to the other side of the drive, and while

it’s being carried, all that weight of all the weightless flakes,

one on one on one, becomes like the taking

of all your treasured goods and holding them on through

the long memory of acquisition to sending them

to the children of a close friend and imagine them

opening their boxes, all the treasures you’d hunted for

and saved all those years and finally deciding: after your surgery:

after your heart bungie jumped: a month after watching

your lover fall in the snow by the edge of the road

and you’d known as you watched him

fall it was unrecoverable, your muscles stiffened

and you sat the mare of your own bulging pump on the edge,

mare raging at her bridled and reined in mouth

and called in the calm shock of someone

who has just been robbed of everything: I think                 

he’s dead, and yes that’s almost exactly how it went.

I’ve read about failed or broken vital organs: hearts

and livers and lungs.  Kidneys.  I imagine how they make

the inner landscape a home we could never live in-

side of unless we were dying, I mean, think about it,

we are always living outside, even when we eat

it’s all hand to mouth, it’s all morsel on the tongue

gnashed and swallowed into the dark but we’re still

outside of it, until we fall down dying, because

that all happens on the inside.  Seed after seed, sight

and sound, after, if you’ve saved some time for it,

all the neckties, idle for throats, after all the art

pieces, after all the pause music…right?  all it takes

is the living to lift it out of the sent box shortly after

it arrives, after it’s been packed and shipped,

after it’s been carried up the icy path and dropped

or nearly so, and is caught just before the door

lets go and hits me, though not hard, tight spring it has

always been, hissing, or just exhaling, but warning me first,

letting me brace for it before I let go and let it fall.