love notes

We Say, Reginald Gibbons

poetry365:

We say a heart breaks—like
a stick, maybe, or a bottle
or a wave. But it seems
more like the field clump
that crackles upward from a match
and collapses, grass filaments
sparking in the ash-dust,
then going out. Today
I take myself down by steps,
one at a time, into the sadness
I admit I can’t always reach.
There should be a room
at the bottom of the black stairway,
my friends sitting with strangers,
waiting, but there’s no one,
only the memory, when
the pale air flickers as if
it were an invisible flame,
of my aunt in her hospital bed
and beside her, about to be left
alone—the last sister, and so soon—
my mother, bent over
the purse in her lap, eyes closed.
I can see the patent leather gloss
and the shiny clasp that until
just now she has been
snapping open and shut, till—
just now—it broke. THat breaking—
like a voice that cracks, cursing
or crying, or the song that falls,
out of thinking too far ahead,
into a smouldering loneliness—
was that the sound of the heart?