Man shaped out of mud And made to speak and love— Let's stick in him a little whisperer, A bucket with two holes. Let's give him the Great Deceiver, A blood-stone. A church with a vaulted ceiling Where the White and Blue Niles meet. A dog who cries after dark. Everyone has a heart, Even the people who don't. It floats up like a beached whale in the autopsy. The heart has no sense of humor. It offers itself piteously like a pair of handcuffs, And is so clumsy that we turn away. The past Is a quarryful of marble statues With heads and genitals erased, But the heart is a muscle made of sharkbone and mutters, Resting place softened with hay Where all the cows come home, finally.
Copyright © 2012 by Monica Ferrell. Used with permission of the author.
Only seagulls surround us balanced on their parameter of hunger, and seals who in their soft-body swim roll onto the rocks to stretch their skin to infinite edges. They lie about like sleeping infants. If there are sharks they swim beneath sight. The water slides by undisturbed and the cold sun slips through a seam in the clouds. Persistent wind like a child's wailing cramps our fingers intertwined like nest twigs. The picnic, pocketed into parts, will wait. We will be as those seals, full-fat on ocean air and lying beneath the cloud shift until the tidemark measures the horizon and our huddled bodies take the shape of stones.
Published by The Midwest Quarterly, 2003. Copyright © 1999 by Eva Alice Counsell. Used with permission. All rights reserved.