This black heart, rocking, punched out and quarter-
decked, punctured and mutilated, drips incandescent
green rainbows from severed coronary arteries. This
torn, conflicted dragon at war, all darkness and
streaming light. This surging, recurring aortic strain
ought to be confined to a narrow cask and lashed
down below decks against the typhoon. These
massive iron bands that bind its chambers with their
accordion expansion joints, they feel the heat and
the passion, the chill and the mortal motor brushes
along the whirling rotations and beats. This image
of a black heart, tossing, rocking, this grisly gimbaled
binnacle magnetic anomaly, this portrait of everyday
agony and temporal decay, this candle at midnight,
friends to toads and vicars and crossroad fiends.
These howling winds bleat their spectral refrain and
ice up the rigging and lines. It goads, it gloats, it
glows, it snows in fragrant flakes of ambergris. This
ship's lamp burning astern, this cold wind of the dark
passage, pitch night, brilliant stars, it goes, it goes
on, it grows along like embroidered verse below the
captain's quarters. This cruise, this curse, this fell
dragon, these joints, these brushes, this wasted,
untasted wine gurgling in the scuppers of this arch
black heart.
Amazing, truly epic vocabulary fireworks, the way you connected the heart with all sorts of marine themes. It even snows in fragrant flakes of some ambergris which comes from whales. The feeling of sea is astounding and emphasizes the trepidations and turmoils of life which, as I believe, the heart embodies, being the very core of being. The heart guides the ship but also hurts, it's an ambiguous organ. The title itself- black heart, prepares one for the chain of raging metaphors and contrastive conceits.
ReplyDelete"friends to toads and vicars and crossroad fiends"- I love this line about 'crossroad friends'. It reminds me how friends just come and go and they are all to often a makeshift affair that sinks soon just like the life within you rendering the efforts you made- painfully useless.
Great work, possibly the best one of yours lately.
i'm glad you like it. i agree it's more substantial than much of late. last week i took a trip to san diego and have been slow to begin approaching my equilibrium again; first piece since coming back was 'let.' naturally, nautical themes have injected themselves. for this one i was driving to go get chinese food and i heard a couple stories on the radio that kind of got mixed up in my mind. one was about a playright saying that his characters even with the blackest hearts are also full of light. i wanted to write about this, only not with the <3-shaped heart, but with a real blood-pump bound in iron bindings that had been repeatedly pierced to let some of the light shine out. btw, it's 'fiends,' not 'friends,' lending it a possibly different slant than you'd imagined.
ReplyDeleteuh playwright. right. write?
ReplyDeleteOh my, the heart imagery is quite startling--the speaker's heart is both black and green, both dying and sick. How doubly morbid.
ReplyDeleteBtw, I loved the 'ambergris' part ;).