poetry wednesday : what is the strength of your legendary muscle, that organ of attachment?
This is a poem to read aloud.
The Hearts
by Robert Pinsky
The legendary muscle that wants and grieves,
The organ of attachment, the pump of thrills
And troubles, clinging in stubborn colonies
Like pulpy shore-life battened on a jetty.
Slashed by the little deaths of sleep and pleasure,
They swell in the nurturing spasms of the waves,
Sucking to cling; and even in death itself—
Baked, frozen—they shrink to grip the granite harder.
“Rid yourself of attachments and aversions”—
But in her father’s orchard, already, he says
He’d like to be her bird, and she says: Sweet, yes,
Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing,
Showing that she knows already—as Art Pepper,
That first time he takes heroin, already knows
That he will go to prison, and that he’ll suffer
And knows he needs to have it, or die; and the one
Who makes the General lose the world for love
Lets him say, Would I had never seen her, but Oh!
Says Enobarbus, Then you would have missed
A wonderful piece of work, which left unseen
Would bring less glory to your travels. Among
The creatures in the rock-torn surf, a wave
Of agitation, a gasp. A scholar quips,
Shakespeare was almost certainly homosexual,
Bisexual, or heterosexual, the sonnets
Provide no evidence on the matter. He writes
Romeo an extravagant speech on tears,
In the Italian manner, his teardrops cover
His chamber window, says the boy, he calls them crystals,
Inanely, and sings them to Juliet with his heart:
The almost certainly invented heart
Which Buddha denounces, in its endless changes
Forever jumping and moving, like an ape.
Over the poor beast’s head the crystal fountain
Crashes illusions, the cold salt spume of pain
And meaningless distinction, as Buddha says,
But here in the crystal shower mouths are open
To sing, it is Lee Andrews and The Hearts
In 1957, singing I sit in my room
Looking out at the rain, My tear drops are
Like crystals, they cover my windowpane, the turns
Of these illusions we make become their glory:
To Buddha every distinct thing is illusion
And becoming is destruction, but still we sing
In the shower. I do. In the beginning God drenched
The Emptiness with images: the potter
Crosslegged at his wheel in Benares market
Making mud cups, another cup each second
Tapering up between his fingers, one more
To sell the tea-seller at a penny a dozen,
And tea a penny a cup. The customers smash
The empties, and waves of traffic grind the shards
To mud for new cups, in turn; and I keep one here
Next to me: holding it awhile from out of the cloud
Of dust that rises from the shattered pieces,
The risen dust alive with fire, then settled
And soaked and whirling again on the wheel that turns
And looks on the world as on another cloud,
On everything the heart can grasp and throw away
As a passing cloud, with even Enlightenment
Itself another image, another cloud
To break and churn a salt foam over the heart
Like an anemone that sucks at clouds and makes
Itself with clouds and sings in clouds and covers
Its windowpane with clouds that blur and melt,
Until one clings and holds—as once in the Temple
In the time before the Temple was destroyed
A young priest saw the seraphim of the Lord:
Each had six wings, with two they covered their faces,
With two they covered their legs and feet, with two
They darted and hovered like dragonflies or perched
Like griffins in the shadows near the ceiling—
These are the visions, too barbarous for heaven
And too preposterous for belief on earth,
God sends to taunt his prophet with the truth
No one can see, that leads to who knows where.
A seraph took a live coal from the altar
And seared the prophet’s lips, and so he spoke.
As the record ends, a coda in retard:
The Hearts in a shifting velvety ah, and ah
Prolonged again, and again as Lee Andrews
Reaches ah high for I have to gain Faith, Hope
And Charity, God only knows the girl
Who will love me—Oh! if we only could
Start over again! Then The Hearts chant the chords
Again a final time, ah and the record turns
Through all the music, and on into silence again.
