HEARTSLEIGHT
Whose bells chatter in the pine needles that never sing
of winter, never glitter in the shag-shuffed ice of shivers:
those long ago seasons that crawled from polar reaches
and touched our skins and glinting shelters -- tools
rising to meet sunmelt. We put on our boots and coats.
At first
all was mudmelt, mudheart. A half-moon nursing
the hare-cubs, the wolf-girls.
But then a starched acceleration
of haunted winds, hot with our own hunger
blossomed along ravines:
ravenous sucking rivers full
of so many days, so many skins.
Sinews invisibly thick with every death --
exhausted, expressed.
What resurrection we’ve called forth!
Our own fat beasts full of animate wailing!
They are so like us -- the way we are, were --
slithering: shocked by fear, desire, starlight --
heartbreak, heartsleight.
But today, now, I am so tired.
I want to look away.
Tell me
that it’s going to be okay. That it already happened.
That it’s over. That we’re in heaven.
And then
let’s have a picnic. Let’s mark those moments
when the trees touch the clouds, when the grass
hums the sweet green song that thrums our bones
to blooming.
& after
let’s watch the constellations of kindness -- our familiars --
come softly out to bless us, safe and sound
and blissfully stupid,
all wrapped up in
all wrapped up in
this blue and beautiful house.
MICHELLE DETORIE is the author of numerous chapbooks including Fur Birds (Insert Press), How Hate Got Hand (eohippus labs), and Bellum Letters (Dusie). She also makes visual poems, poetry objects, and time-based poetry. Her first full-length collection, After-Cave, is just out with Ahsahta Press.
