The Aging Heart

“Youth gone and beauty, what remains of bliss? …The longing of a heart pent up forlorn, A silent heart whose silence loves and longs; The silence of a heart which sang its songs While youth and beauty made a summer morn, Silence of love that cannot sing again.” --from Christina Rossetti’s Monna Innominata My heart is bruised and swollen

as a warrior surrendering his arms after battle,

as a child, elated, who trips, hurts himself, sobbing.

It has its own desires, its dreams,

while I house it resentfully,

a reluctant tenant in my chest.

It dreams of its own bursting,

exploding with ardor, with blood and longing,

after the closeness, the nearness of you.

Unable to fulfill its need,

it corrodes, damaged by neglect.

It yearns for its own fingers to touch,

a mouth to taste skin, to drink your fragrance,

but it can only throb and weep

for its desired object, unattainable.

It doesn’t even know its true nature—

a fragment of the universal heart,

a shard of the earth’s pulsing core,

an organ made of magma, of zeal,

a lost piece of the world

and its insatiable hunger for itself,

for its creatures, wounded and wandering,

for its solemn rocks and trees,

for the expanse of its steel oceans.

Yet the heart does not know

that it resides in a body that is aging.

It is as hopeful, as youthful

as the day it was first conceived in the womb.

I want to be thin and white, slender-necked,

masked and impenetrable as the swan,

so that you may desire me.

But the body decays

as gradually as the bones of the child lengthen,

as the timid March buds recline into summer,

as the oak leaves wilt and fade to autumn.

And the heart, trapped, ignorant,

goes on loving with the same swollen fervor,

opening and closing its valves

with the same passion of youth.