MY HEART'S BEEN DOGPADDLING

MY HEART’S BEEN DOGPADDLING

My heart’s been dogpaddling in its own blood for so long

it’s hard to tell whether I’m drowning

or waiting to be rescued.

Some stars are salt, and some are sweet

and the rivers flow back into the sea like living languages

back into their mother-tongue

in a mingling of eloquent pilgrims

and dragons don’t linger long in stagnant waters

and the autumn wind might have a few leaves

to say something wise and enduring about it all,

and the mindstream clarify itself in its running,

but I like to linger among the lilies

still tucked here and there behind the ears of the shore for awhile

as if each were a woman

or an enlightened lifeboat

tethered by my spinal cord to the bottom of things

like a star always is to its dark mother.

Whatever that means. Honestly,

things get away from me sometimes like fire and doves

as forms of thought slide out of their thawing like butter and snakes

and the best things I’ve ever said

were in words that completely ignored me.

And there is something metaphysically Chaplinesque

about the way my most cherished profundities,

the ones that make my eyes fall silent

always seem freaked with gestures of pain

as if I hadn’t learned to love my loneliness perfectly yet.

Maybe I’m wrong after all these years

and the error has gone on elaborating interminably as me

but I still think it’s better not to be understood by a buddha

than severely articulated by a mob

even when I make a mess

of my delusions of you.

Would you have trusted me more

if I had told you not to?

Would you have loved me any better

if I had said I didn’t love you

and tried to mean it as long as I could?