Gypsy Heart

This entry is part 46 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

Every once in a while the branches part
and there is a gleaming splinter of light–

just enough to nick the rough bark, make it seem
like the scritch of a match head had birthed

its copper sides and these rich, fluttering
halos of green. Hard to court abundance,

hard to keep it— And yet, here is a feather
left behind by the crested bird, the silken pods

from the honey locusts, vermillion threads
pulled from the frayed tapestry: what surged

like ripeness once, continues to show its face—
shy homeless waif, knocking again on your door.

About

Via Negativa is a unique experiment in daily, poetic conversation with the living and the dead. Dave Bonta founded the site in 2003 and Luisa A. Igloria joined in 2010. Guest authors contribute as well. Dave writes daily erasure poems to discover the poetry hidden in the Diary of Samuel Pepys. Luisa has been writing and posting a poem a day since November 2010, often in response to Dave’s entries at The Morning Porch. Collections of poems first published at Via Negativa include Luisa’s The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis and Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser, and Dave’s Ice Mountain and Breakdown: Banjo Poems. Read more…

Albert B. Casuga says:

May 4, 2011 at 8:22 pm

Hard to court abundance, /hard to keep it— . . .what surged/
like ripeness once, continues to show its face—/ shy homeless waif, knocking again on your door.

BEWARE, MY FOOLISH HEART…

When you gave up on dreams we gathered
like hoarded heartaches haplessly heaped

in darkened rooms we have long abandoned,
we stitched close a gaping wound of hurts

hurled helter skelter in a frenzy of fearsome
faithlessness we found were a fool’s scimitar.

O, corazon triste! O, corazon de Gitana!
A sad, miserable heart is a gypsy heart!

Beware this desolate heart, when it is hard
to find and hard to keep: when it surges, as

it must defiantly burst into a pulsing geyser
of desire, it will not spare the idle, hardened

heart. Surging like the ripeness it once was,
it continues to show its face—a scrawny waif,

shy and homeless, incessantly knocking,
insistently rapping at your bolted door.

You leave it ajar, and it creeps in like the fog
that chilled your heart once, it lingers, it chokes

your still smarting heart with a frisson
of a joie d’couer.You take him in for the night

and in the coldness of a morning after, phantom
that it was, leaps out of your window, and leaves.

—Albert B. Casuga
05-04-11

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