Every once in a while the branches part
and there is a gleaming splinter of light–
just enough to nick the rough bark, make it seem
like the scritch of a match head had birthed
its copper sides and these rich, fluttering
halos of green. Hard to court abundance,
hard to keep it— And yet, here is a feather
left behind by the crested bird, the silken pods
from the honey locusts, vermillion threads
pulled from the frayed tapestry: what surged
like ripeness once, continues to show its face—
shy homeless waif, knocking again on your door.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Hard to court abundance, /hard to keep it— . . .what surged/
like ripeness once, continues to show its face—/ shy homeless waif, knocking again on your door.
BEWARE, MY FOOLISH HEART…
When you gave up on dreams we gathered
like hoarded heartaches haplessly heaped
in darkened rooms we have long abandoned,
we stitched close a gaping wound of hurts
hurled helter skelter in a frenzy of fearsome
faithlessness we found were a fool’s scimitar.
O, corazon triste! O, corazon de Gitana!
A sad, miserable heart is a gypsy heart!
Beware this desolate heart, when it is hard
to find and hard to keep: when it surges, as
it must defiantly burst into a pulsing geyser
of desire, it will not spare the idle, hardened
heart. Surging like the ripeness it once was,
it continues to show its face—a scrawny waif,
shy and homeless, incessantly knocking,
insistently rapping at your bolted door.
You leave it ajar, and it creeps in like the fog
that chilled your heart once, it lingers, it chokes
your still smarting heart with a frisson
of a joie d’couer.You take him in for the night
and in the coldness of a morning after, phantom
that it was, leaps out of your window, and leaves.
—Albert B. Casuga
05-04-11