A HEARTBREAK IS A SIMPLE FRACTURE

Nothing ever heals without a mark

The bone thickens

Over the hairline crack

And the skin bunches itself

Like a garment secured with a safety pin

Over the site of a wound.

Fire leaves its red blaze

On the wilderness of the body,

You follow those signs to pain

That ancient thickening

Whose memory makes you wince

Like a scar bereft of sensation

But hideous to look at.

It’s said when a fracture mends

The broken place is stronger

Than ever before. But remember

The stiffening, the inevitable loss

Of flexion,

Small deformities located only

By feeling.

You might seem whole as a vase

Carefully cemented by an expert

In the repair of

Rare vessels

Yet the weather will compound

Old injuries

Auditioning in each sprain

Or broken femur

Whistling along the nerve

Like a northerly.

Examine the eye transfixed

By awful visions.

The lover vanishing down the stairs

For the last time,

The child disappearing

In deep water,

A building on fire with every window

Orange as a marigold

Blooming with screams.

Examine lips

How they blossom with small roses,

How the thorns of language fall

From them like hooks,

How they open dark and sudden

Like the crevice

In which eels lurk

Vicious as tongues.

Examine the heart

How it is pierced with an arrow

In all the depictions of love.

It is a prisoner

In a jail of bone knowing

It can never escape alive.

You can die of

Its breaking. You can die of the callus

That forms when there is no response

To its assiduous knocking

the new renaissance