My Heart

This adventure, ready to be told. 

Upstream must be a falls since we hear it, but here on the silty bank it’s quiet and gentle while we watch a woman hold a young boy’s head under the surface of the cleanest stream, pebbles bright and colorful below, resolute while he kicks and bucks and attempts to rear against her grip then slows until his body brooks her assault and his dark hair waves like tendrils of so long.

Between the dog and the wolf lies the fleeting butterfly of youth.

Eventide. Sicily. Zimbabwe.

“Give me your hand. I will hold it now and beyond.”

This cocoon we arrived in, snared between a train’s blare and the stutter-step of the land. Someone told me there were mushroom clouds over New York City and maybe Palermo too. I was two-thirds into my trip, urgent to curl inward, blessed by topography and the sky’s corvid plaint. Mercy me. Lucky me. I never saw the land itself upend.

That whole wood—those quaking dreamland treetops—flinches in the glare of our stopgap moment.

Ain’t no one can bring the news like… Shine Billy Until… Swine Hilly Unwell… Spine Silly Upswell… Crime Filly Upscale.

It’s a silvery muscle caught in a creek and released, a quick last shiver in the treetops.

It’s drama and glamor and the scarlet clamor of a cardinal; admit you never understood Manc swagger.

Moyo wangu. Moyo wangu. Moyo wangu.

Claudia is a woman playing an accordion in the barroom on the headland. She must endure jokes from the regulars, all men, about catching her tits in it. But she isn’t playing for them. A man who might have passed on by is snagged by the wheeze of her songs and changes course to enter the small room. Claudia only thinks of blood in a river. Of a bloodred heart.

“I miss you, my singular boy.”

Slung amid the clatter, clenched like knotted ganglia, the night is mostly silent till a siren blurts, greyed beneath this brickwork, cursing such rodent luck this far underneath the aqueduct. 

Cry, my blackcurrant eyes, my sly rat face.

“Did Anna fall, or was she claimed?”

When did you arrive? How have I missed you? I meant to write a poem or even a song, awaiting your approval, but my aim failed, all these sounds imploding like elastic chatter, some cleansing, cumulative, noteworthy collapse.

Not everything succumbs to appraisal, and much exceeds our grasp.

"Entre chien et loup." 

If you are here, please love it all, most everything, the faraway horizons, the clotheared, ruined, spangled things that mattered. 

________

Image © Rebecca Loranger