The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart: Poems

the wind blows through the doors of my heartThe wind blowsthrough the doors of my heart.It scatters my sheet musicthat climbs like waves from the piano, free of the keys.Now the notes stripped, black butterflies,flattened against the screens.The wind through my heartblows all my candles out.In my heart and its rooms is dark and windy.From the mantle smashes birds’ nests, teacupsfull of stars as the wind winds round,a mist of sorts that rises and bends and blowsor is blown through my rooms of my heartthat shatters the windows,rakes the bedsheets as though someonehad just made love. And my dressesthey are lifted like brides come to reston the bedstead, crucifixes,dresses tangled in trees in the roomsof my heart. To save themI’ve thrown flowers to fields,so that someone would pick them upand know where they came from.Come the bees now clinging to flowered curtains.Off with the clothesline pinning anything, my mother’s      trousseau.It is not for me to say what is this windor how it came to blow through the rooms of my heart.Wing after wing, through the rooms of the deadthe wind does not blow. Nor the basement, no wheezing,no wind choking the cobwebs in our hair.It is cool here, quiet, a quilt spread on soil.But we will never lie down again.the birthingCall out the names in the procession of the loved.Call from the blood the ancestors here to bear witnessto the day he stopped the car,we on our way to a great banquet in his honor.In a field a cow groaned lowing, trying to give birth,what he called front leg presentation,the calf come out nose first, one front leg dangling from his      mother.A fatal sign he said while rolling up the sleevesof his dress shirt, and climbed the fence.I watched him thrust his arms entireinto the yet-to-be, where I imagined holy sparrows scatteringin the hall of souls for his big mortal hands just to make way.With his whole weight he pushed the calf back in the motherand grasped the other leg tucked up like a closed wingagainst the new one’s shoulder.And found a way in the warm dark to bring both legs outinto the world together.Then heaved and pulled, the cow arching her back.Until a bull calf, in a whoosh of blood and water,came falling whole and still onto the meadow.We rubbed his blackness, bloodying our hands.The mother licked her newborn, of us oblivious,until it moved a little, struggled.I ran to get our coats, mine a green velvet cloak,and his tuxedo jacket, and worked to rub the new one drywhile he set out to find the farmer.When it was over, the new calf suckling his mother,the farmer soon to lead them to the barn,leaving our coats just where they laywe huddled in the car.And then made love toward eternity,without a word drove slowly home. And loved some more.a man like thisThat summer he and my brothersunload rusty barrels on the hill above the lake,the barrels to be filled with air from a compressormostly on the blink to buoy up the dockthat’s sagging, starboard, almost sunk.It’s a long enterprise that will take daysof sinking barrels in the shallows,rolled out half full of water, to the hull.My brothers dive and struggle,drumming their heads and elbowswhere the jack cranks up the far left corner,then treading water, shaking headsand spouting as men do in grand productionsof hard work, their little sisters watching,drown the barrel, hoist it up between the beams.Now the compressor’s hose so many times wrappedround with plumber’s tape,stuck in the barrel, hisses out the muck,the remnant water, oil and stink.My brothers wear my father’s surgeon’s masksas if that helps. And so it goes,this or some other year, except todayhigh on the hill one barrel tilts, set downsideways on its own lid, perhaps,and pitches, beating down the hill toward childrenin a playpen, children in the shallows playing, mother     shouting.What does my father do but leap over the hilland fly a moment, airborne over gravel tryingto catch the barrel till he falls sliding, sprawled and rakedacross the stones. The babies scream.The barrel hits the water, bobs into the cove.Still, for a moment he is flying out beyond heroics,willed aloft a little once above the earth.Better such flight than consequence.I want a man like thiswho, restless, bookish, given to sudden outburstsor affection, takes running jumps,it would seem, all his life, against reason,a man who flies and falls, scraped head to toe,whose daughters wash him in the lakewith Ivory soap,dive down to pick the rock shardsfrom his legs, then dry him gently offand lay him in the Ozarks sun on a half- sunken dockand rub his ripped and bleeding skin with ointment.