Art Heart

... To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal,
to hold it

against your own bones knowing
your own life depends on it
and, when the time comes to let go,
to let it go.

... Mary Oliver, from “In Blackwater Woods”
American Primitive


***


The farmer of Knighton was very friendly with the pixies. He used to leave a floorful of corn when he was short-handed, and the pixies would thrash it for him. They did an immense amount of work for him, until one night his wife peeped through the peephole and saw them hard at it. She wasn’t afraid of their squinny eyes and hairy bodies, but she thought it a crying shame they should go naked and cold. She set to work and made some warm clothes for them and left them on the threshing floor, and after that there was no help from the pixies.

They did not forget the farmer, however, for one day, after Withypool Church bells were rung, the pixy father met him on an upland field.

“Wilt gie us the lend of thy plough and tackle?” (that is, packhorses and crooks) he said.

“What vor do ‘ee want ‘n’?” the farmer asked.

“I’d want to take my good wife and littlings out of the noise of they ding-dongs.”

The farmer trusted the pixies, and they moved lock, stock, and barrell, over the Winsford Hill; and when the old packhorses trotted home, they looked like beautiful two-year-olds.

-- R.L. Tongue, Somerset Folklore


ART HEART

March 12, 2006

The heart has no place
in the market -- ask
any of its players
from salt-seller to
grifter to brass tycoon.
I wonder too if the heart
should veer right of
poetry so to avoid
all confusion of verbal
swoon with the real
songs of love, the
ten thousand simple
ditties which compose
a couple’s fateful life.
The heart of art
is pure usury,
gold on one side of
the glittery wave
and Arctic blue on
its other, never meant
for beds or the
tender garden of
days. The art of
the heart ships to
shores far down
from the heart
of the art, where
it’s always full moon
and the waves
crash like milked
silver, harrowing and
blue and incessantly
brutal and deep
and divine. I swim
with the nixies
and wake with my wife,
secure in this
narrowed conceit
of two vaults meant
to fill far from the other
yet mutually misered
by one sambaltique
sea. Coinage and vantage
mean less in its slopes
than heels and mizzen,
spars cast far below.
However I say it is wrong
though the distinction
is true. Whalers in
crow’s nests would
agree: cask your oil
safe below; keep
an eye trained equally
on flukes and home
shores; and always
remember where you’re
standing, and on what,
somewhere between
God and the vast
plunging sea. Thus
I keep my heart
in its soul cage
beating sure down the page.