A truth and two other poems
Mar. 19th, 2022 08:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormI've realized something important about gender tonight.
It's never really made sense to me; I love people and they have a gender and it's sometimes a useful shorthand for getting into a relationship with them, there are roles about which one can make assumptions and it simplifies the whole thing. But I never understood how the internal feeling of attraction was supposed to relate to gender. There's a sort of polarity there, a spark that comes *because* of folks' gender.
Well, I'm a land spirit. I love the land, a particular piece of land, though I can love many I tend to primary-relationship with one. But that's not what I mean; that's logistics. What I mean is there's a polarity there, a completion, a yin and yang of intrinsic selfhood that drives an intimate pull and relationship. The land being land is a driver of my love for it, in a way that a person being a gender does not. It does, perhaps, lead me to understand how folks with that kind of attraction might feel.
Anyhow, driving through Fort in the twilight with my grief, this will be a separation that will bring me so much pain. So much.
Another Poem About the Heart
Jenn Habel
When the floor drops out, as it has now,
you cannot hear the squirrel on the wire
outside your window, the wheels spinning
on the road below. You want only pity
and are presented with the unbelievable
effrontery of a world that moves on.
But wait: this is not the person you are.
You’re the kind of person who
sits in dark theaters crying at the collarbones
that curve across the dancers’ chests,
at the proof of a perfection they represent;
a person who goes out walking in a four-day drizzle,
sees a pot of geraniums and is seized, overcome
by how they can bring so much (what else
can you call it?) joy. You love the world,
are sure, at least, that you have. But be truthful:
you only love freely things that have nothing
to do with you. You’re like a matchstick house:
intricately constructed but flimsy and hollow inside.
You’re a house in love with the trees beside you –
able to look at them all day, aware of how faithful they are –
but unable to forgive that they’d lie down
leaving you exposed and alone in a large enough storm.
The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart
Margaret Atwood
I do not mean the symbol
of love, a candy shape
to decorate cakes with,
the heart that is supposed
to belong or break;
I mean this lump of muscle
that contracts like a flayed biceps,
purple-blue, with its skin of suet,
its skin of gristle, this isolate,
this caved hermit, unshelled
turtle, this one lungful of blood,
no happy plateful.
All hearts float in their own
deep oceans of no light,
wetblack and glimmering,
their four mouths gulping like fish.
Hearts are said to pound:
this is to be expected, the heart’s
regular struggle against being drowned.
But most hearts say, I want, I want,
I want, I want. My heart
is more duplicitous,
though to twin as I once thought.
It says, I want, I don’t want, I
want, and then a pause.
It forces me to listen,
and at night it is the infra-red
third eye that remains open
while the other two are sleeping
but refuses to say what it has seen.
It is a constant pestering
in my ears, a caught moth, limping drum,
a child’s fist beating
itself against the bedsprings:
I want, I don’t want.
How can one live with such a heart?
Long ago I gave up singing
to it, it will never be satisfied or lulled.
One night I will say to it:
Heart, be still,
and it will.
You don't understand. Threshold has loved me better than any human has, or can, or will.
It's never really made sense to me; I love people and they have a gender and it's sometimes a useful shorthand for getting into a relationship with them, there are roles about which one can make assumptions and it simplifies the whole thing. But I never understood how the internal feeling of attraction was supposed to relate to gender. There's a sort of polarity there, a spark that comes *because* of folks' gender.
Well, I'm a land spirit. I love the land, a particular piece of land, though I can love many I tend to primary-relationship with one. But that's not what I mean; that's logistics. What I mean is there's a polarity there, a completion, a yin and yang of intrinsic selfhood that drives an intimate pull and relationship. The land being land is a driver of my love for it, in a way that a person being a gender does not. It does, perhaps, lead me to understand how folks with that kind of attraction might feel.
Anyhow, driving through Fort in the twilight with my grief, this will be a separation that will bring me so much pain. So much.
Another Poem About the Heart
Jenn Habel
When the floor drops out, as it has now,
you cannot hear the squirrel on the wire
outside your window, the wheels spinning
on the road below. You want only pity
and are presented with the unbelievable
effrontery of a world that moves on.
But wait: this is not the person you are.
You’re the kind of person who
sits in dark theaters crying at the collarbones
that curve across the dancers’ chests,
at the proof of a perfection they represent;
a person who goes out walking in a four-day drizzle,
sees a pot of geraniums and is seized, overcome
by how they can bring so much (what else
can you call it?) joy. You love the world,
are sure, at least, that you have. But be truthful:
you only love freely things that have nothing
to do with you. You’re like a matchstick house:
intricately constructed but flimsy and hollow inside.
You’re a house in love with the trees beside you –
able to look at them all day, aware of how faithful they are –
but unable to forgive that they’d lie down
leaving you exposed and alone in a large enough storm.
The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart
Margaret Atwood
I do not mean the symbol
of love, a candy shape
to decorate cakes with,
the heart that is supposed
to belong or break;
I mean this lump of muscle
that contracts like a flayed biceps,
purple-blue, with its skin of suet,
its skin of gristle, this isolate,
this caved hermit, unshelled
turtle, this one lungful of blood,
no happy plateful.
All hearts float in their own
deep oceans of no light,
wetblack and glimmering,
their four mouths gulping like fish.
Hearts are said to pound:
this is to be expected, the heart’s
regular struggle against being drowned.
But most hearts say, I want, I want,
I want, I want. My heart
is more duplicitous,
though to twin as I once thought.
It says, I want, I don’t want, I
want, and then a pause.
It forces me to listen,
and at night it is the infra-red
third eye that remains open
while the other two are sleeping
but refuses to say what it has seen.
It is a constant pestering
in my ears, a caught moth, limping drum,
a child’s fist beating
itself against the bedsprings:
I want, I don’t want.
How can one live with such a heart?
Long ago I gave up singing
to it, it will never be satisfied or lulled.
One night I will say to it:
Heart, be still,
and it will.
You don't understand. Threshold has loved me better than any human has, or can, or will.
