THE CIRCUMCISION OF THE HEART

Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart,
and be no more stiffnecked.
- Deuteronomy 10:16 (KJV)

1/

Often it comes when I’m doing something else,

walking to the shops in the iambics of rhythmic

languor, or picking my nose waiting for

the washing machine to finish, the brawling

of sparrows softened to music by the windowpane,

or the moment you catch the blades of grass

whispering to each other, their hearts beating

wildly before they notice you, maybe the distant

sound of thunder, where the creative impulse

is in the small things – limericks rather than Epic,

and Dresden china shepherds, not Michelangelo.

2/

It starts as a music half familiar, half alien

inside and outside at the same time,

and in that chorus of momentary distraction

is the sound that explains everything.

Then you hear the words, not quite in your language,

Delphic babble requiring a coat of gloss,

even as I half-heartedly take dictation

and the lines fall and lie down neatly in furrows

on the page’s chaste snow coverlet.

3/

Or else it’s a bit like a snowball rolling down

the piste, gathering snow as it goes.

“Whereof we cannot speak,” says Wittgenstein,

“thereof we must remain silent.”

Bullshit says the poet, bordering on apoplexy

to communicate the state of their inscape,

That’s why I have all these figures of speech,

the circumlocutions of language aspiring

to a more refined version of the crude

grok that is music. An MRI can show you feeling,

but a Beethoven symphony reveals what it feels like.

4/

Salting Carthage earth on Margarita night

it’s hard sticking to those revolvers

that the bloated commander of the Luftwaffe mentions

(though were he wittier, he should have reached

for his Browning, but Nazis were rarely clever)

when the world hates your guts,

but praise is the honeytrap that keeps you

circling the foothills of Enlightenment

or picking up shells when the Pacific lies behind you.

If you wear a mask out where people can see you

they think they know you, you’re a mate, in their gang

or their worst enemy, so don’t expect me

to go with the flow… She won’t be right…

5/

Poetry is like crack:

write enough of it and it becomes part of you

like yearning or an elbow.

In a poem is a more efficient expression

than trying to talk to you.