Becoming Fig

A fragment of rock is in my heart. It fell from a place they once called heaven and was later overlaid with ivory and gold. It was once wood. It once bore all the marks of its origin and was broken in order to last. This small rock now grows like a flower that grows inside a fruit. It grows humbly. It grows with the dream of revelation but fills me with such grace that I am in dismay. I call tradespeople to work away at it. During their labour they have been learning how to share. Learning to take turns with items and to accept their lack of success because the rock has proved immovable. We have been involved in many discussions and they finally leave after telling me they think it would be easier to introduce new planets to the world than to remove the small sharp piece of stone that is the cause of all my beauty. One day after more time has passed I realize I have two very sharp teeth in my mouth and then only because they slice the words as they come out, thin and edgy like needles or darts. (These words are meant for unhappiness. Their purpose is to cut the flesh and expose the insides of those who had made my heart heavy. These words took many years to grow.) Upon discovering the teeth my idea was to bend my head down to my chest and chew through the breast until reaching the rock. But the fragment had been storing up kisses while it slept and the more I gnashed the wider it opened its bloom to my pain. The scent of disbelief rose like a barb to my face. I became irrational. Blessed and happy I pretended to fear an idea of god that came from the fragment’s brutal and sensual mind. Firmer and firmer it embedded itself in the wind that rushed through the centre of me. My heart began to beat with the sound of small rips and tears. I know that if my heart is turned inside out the slice of rock will defy gravity, floating upwards to hell like a single rising star.

Fear of Quizzes

The question comes out of the cement in the courtyard and points as if a tree to the sky. A man walks beneath it. He carries papers and is bent upon his destination. The question moves ever-so-slightly in an otherwise indetectable breeze. The man does not return that way but a woman sits on the small circle of soil where the question meets the earth. It hangs over her head as she takes a comb from her bag and separates her hair. A child skips around the perimeter of the yard unknowingly sowing the question’s seeds which have stuck to his shoes. The question hovers for many years in the square outliving the man, the woman and the child before dying. A bird flies from a living tree to land in its unanswered branches and there builds a nest and feeds its chicks. The question’s seedlings, the ones that have forced their way through the bound earth, watch all this. A man on a bicycle runs some of them over on his way to an appearance on a quiz show. The questions he will answer there are artificially generated and did not grow. An audience will sit and clap when he gives correct faux-answers to the faux-questions. The questions in the courtyard meanwhile grow toward the sun and provide shade and air. A fear approaching one finds itself gradually fading until an invisible presence reaches and rests against a trunk. The question supporting the disappearance of the fear suddenly fruits and under this weight a bough bends and, briefly, touches the earth.

Today, Drunk

The question comes out of the cement in the courtyard and points as if a tree to the sky.Today, drunk, but only in the brain, life resolves forever the flower we call nurture, what grows and grows is love or lack of it and this is what we attach ourselves to, this love or lack.

Why do we always leave so much room for disappointment in our nests? Slight bronze oval of the frame around the chosen pictures of our life. All that is not captured, what has eluded our fear.

Cock doesn’t crow any more. No Christ in the hedgerows. We don’t walk the streets anymore and put the sights into poetry. Is there anyone left who remembers Apollinaire’s marvellous rain? His cubiculalocanda?

Doors are slamming in the breeze which has come too late to cool us. The air is still both before and after the moment we recognize as life. I’m happy with my head between the palings of fence. There is so much turmoil in the sun.

Get up! Get up! In the morning what’s left over is death. The day should grab you like a dog biting your hand. Dreaming with your nose in the grass.

What’s got when thinking wears off? Just love in the drain as thick and heavy as evening with its fall. We understand this little bit and shout it in each other’s ears.

Could be any word.

About the Poet
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MTC Cronin has had seven books and one booklet of poetry published, the most recent being beautiful, unfinished ~ PARABLE/SONG/CANTO/POEM,  published in 2003 through Salt Publishing (UK). She is currently teaching writing and working on her doctorate, Poetry and Law: Discourses of the Social Heart, at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.