Anatomy

Man shaped out of mud
And made to speak and love—
Let’s stick in him a little whisperer,

A bucket with two holes.
Let’s give him the Great Deceiver,
A blood-stone.

A church with a vaulted ceiling
Where the White and Blue Niles meet.
A dog who cries after dark.

Everyone has a heart,
Even the people who don’t.
It floats up like a beached whale in the autopsy.

The heart has no sense of humor.
It offers itself piteously like a pair of handcuffs
And is so clumsy that we turn away.

The past
Is a quarryful of marble statues
With heads and genitals erased,

But the heart is a muscle made of sharkbone and mutters,
Resting place softened with hay
Where all the cows come, finally, home.