The Hearts

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.

Source: The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (HarperCollins, 1996)