Hearts Turn to Dirt

Hearts Turn to Dirt

(“If anyone wants to be first, he will be the last of all and the servant of all.” Mark 9:35b)

There are days when hearts turn to dirt,
not rich garden topsoil,
but crunchy desert crackling underfoot,
shrunk by the sun in judgment.
Those days are long days. Those days are empty
and thorny.
Those days are fraught with heat dreams and
cold fevers. Those days pierce your ears
with isolation and your soul like uncreating
everything that once welcomed spring.

You left a forwarding number (or so you remember),
you told a few best friends where to find you if you did not return
by early September. Yet by October you have lost your way home.
No one phones. No one brings heat for your heart or ice
for your head. In the meantime, suburbs have risen all around
your saguaro hideout. You live outside in the elements,
they live inside with molecules and compounds in boxes
and stained-glass bottles. They play music your heart remembers,
but the chances for joy feel as remote as the friends you
remember from grade school. (You are sure you left them
your number.)

Some are managers, some housewives, some are the principal
paymasters, others dig minerals donated to museums. All were,
at least for a day, or another,
the loves who would massage your heart until the color
returned to your face.

Now, alone, no way home, and no one to keep you from
evaporating to the bone, you rattle. And you wish you could only
be
as silent as they are
when silence was the last thing you needed.