Posts Tagged heart
THE MATTER OF THE HEART
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on January 25th, 2012
A cardio-vascular consultant
told me I had subtle abnormalities
of the heart: a tendency, possibly,
to soften too readily, be swayed
too easily, feed on fantasy, harden
like the Pharaoh’s; be of kings, of lead, of oak,
of darkness;Â bleed for my country, belong
to Daddy; be a lonely hunter;
be displayed on my sleeve; be in my mouth,
in the Highlands, left in ‘Frisco, buried
at Wounded Knee; like Luther’s, who feared his
was like a ship upon a stormy sea
driven by winds from heaven’s four corners.
FIDO
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on January 31st, 2010
Once, when she was very small, a dream woke me.
Dawn, iron cages, a tiger and the eager,
little zoo keeper reaching out to pat it…
She slept soundly, her menagerie too:
balding princess, purblind bear, Mummy -
though not Daddy now nor, in the garden, Fido.
Oozing kapok, hair eroded by
loving, his one eye tarnished but keen like
small expectations, he kept faith by the swing.
Love’s unreason maintained such shabbiness -
and left him out all night. Barefooted,
I fetched him in by the handle. How love’s
confusion aches the heart!
WE PRISONERS
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on June 22nd, 2009
A lark starting from the heather; a lamb
amazed by a heron; a hare gutted
at a turn in the road; the familiar path
obscured by fern, bramble, convolvulus:
the gallery in my head is open
all hours – by turns, thriving and derelict.
The sparrow in my chest, where my heart lay,
now flings itself at broken panes, now stills.
At the end of the pier, where steamships docked,
black-headed gulls and anglers watch and wait.
The steel-faced laughing man will read our stars.
Under the planking, the jelly fish glide.
My heart is a fist clenched in darkness,
a sea-anemone in coral waters.
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