What might have been a heart
whose warm outlines were seared
in the clay— What might have
searched through dank underbrush
for a homing beacon, some fingerprint
flecked with gold— But for now you hear
only the naked blade of a voice, keening
among the brambles, rending its hair
and beating its breast in the fetid
air. Doesn’t it sing this way only
because it’s known the difference? Easier
to chide or scold, spurn it and say it reeks
of pure ungratefulness. Who’d want to marry it,
take it to sup at table, to warmth in the bed?
Wings like glass windows whose sections are soldered
cellophane, the yellow hoverfly courts the bloom
on the stalk. Remember it eats of brittle matter
long decayed; but also of pollen, nectar.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Aperture
- Familiar
- Landscape, with Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
- Prognosis
- Listings
- Grenadilla
- Aubade
- El Sagrado Corazon
- Consolation
- Three (More) Improvisations
- Reconnaissance
- The Gift
- Goldfinch in the Garden
- Talon
- What Cannot Eat
- Happiness
- Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser
- Defense
- Petition to Fullness
- Unending Lyric
- Trace
- Prospecting
- Dear modest four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath
- Shit
- Ode to the Pedicure Place at the Mall
- Defiler
- Letter to Attention
- Real
- Discordant
- Dowsing
- Landscape, with Incipient Questions
- Letter to Stone
- Orison
- Milagrito: Eye of the Raven
- Epithalamium
- What You Don’t Always See
- Going to the Acupuncturist in the Market
- Heart you Want to Lead in from the Cold
- Migrant Letters
- The Road of Imperfect Attentions
- In the Country of Lost Hours
- Morning Lesson
- Reprieve
- Song of the Seamstress’s Daughter
- Landscape, with Construction Worker, Ants, and Gull
- End Times
- Dream Landscape, with Ray-bans and Leyte Landing
- Pantoum, with Spiderweb and Raindrops
- Assassin’s Wake
- Shroud Villanelle
- Dear Annie Oakley,
- Landscape, with Red Omens
- Late Summer Landscape, with Twilight and Daughters
- Ghazal of Unattainable Silence
- Try
- Occasional
- Distance, Then
- Turning
- Noon Prayer
- Acompañamiento
- In the Convent of Perpetual Adoration
- State of Emergency
- Storm Warning
- Charms
- Goodbye, Irene
- The Lovers
- Currents
- Dream of the Four Directions
- Chainus
- Lost Lyric
- Dear recklessness, dear jeweled
- Gleaning
- Bearing Fire
- The Summer of the Angel of Death
- Veneer
Doesn’t it sing this way only /because it’s known the difference?…/ Remember it eats of brittle matter/long decayed; but also of pollen, nectar.
THE DIFFERENCE IT KNOWS
It has known the difference, known it well,
between the cold dark air and sunlit gardens,
and it will take them all in like bricks around
it, impregnable: she will mend these cuts
though they have run through. She will wince
but she will be new. These shards would not
hurt her. It has known the painful difference.
“Shall I walk you through my rose gardens?
Cup a blossom in your hands gently, beware
the guardian thorns, they are its sharp lances.”
It has known the canon of beauty and virtue:
where you are hapless, feign courage, it will
grow unto you like vines binding your broken
pieces, then sit you tall on a throne of roses.
—Albert B. Casuga
07-11-11
Also reposted in:
http://ambitsgambit.blogspot.com/2011/07/difference-it-knows-it-has-known.html