Just old brick and mortar surround the clowns who danced for you in the garden, in the divine intrusion of sunlight or God. You wait silently for your cue, for the first strains of La Sylphide, in a room with no windows. It is these moments when you can hear your passions and penances swelling like rain clouds. It is this moment when you recount your last conversation and it strikes you as strange how he insisted that “cats make the greatest lovers” when he knew you hated them. You had wiped the blood from his lip and laid next to him in the quiet eyes of midnight that was penetrated only by the light from a small tear in the blind. You had questioned nothing that night, your back to the mirror, drinking glasses of rain and firewater; you felt at home in that stark silence. Yes, that heart was left to die, the one that had first love and was replaced.

You played dead for awhile until you found in the restless sands of an hourglass a second heart, a new chance, one that beat stronger. You let the sweep of your hand paint the morning in shades of love, gliding from midnight in a gentle precision. You answered that uncertain voice which seemed to be filled with the wit and wisdom mined from songs your grandfather had sung. You were again allowing smiles to rise across your lip but this too would pass and soon you found another heart, unable to heal, dusted into a corner.

You try to recall fragments of a dream you shared, in coffee shops with your pleasing stories and where we’ll be tomorrow’s, and again take a new heart. This one, you think, will be able to play hide and seek in the desert or the smoke that hovers and fills a silent treasure chest. You learn to play cards only to find the queen of hearts only stares back “why, convince me it was real”, before running off with the king of spades to the outskirts, along the fens of Manhattan. It happens so quick and you find yourself trying to catch the last barge to Baltimore as Uranus moves and is eclipsed by the moon. So quick to have collected another broken heart.

Yes this happened, long before you were queen or he had pulled a Lear for your Cordelia. When you were the light of a new moon, smoking cloves and holding loosely a sachet of St. Johns wort. This heart came with a fire dying in his hands, ashes that are still warm on his skin and you with a smile that leaps upward through the smoldering that concealed your exit across the waking street. This time it was but a hunting trip to you, winged hat on, your heart buried deep in your cape; something to remember only in your closets and sketchbooks.

The pages of memories that show each heart, the ones born to a carpenters daughter, and stained with tears that became the diamonds you tried to buy paradise with. Each heart of yours is etched with answers deep in the crystal of your being, a voice that lingers faintly down the hall, with eyes like your mothers and a love like your fathers. Each heart of yours is kept in a strange urn and you sit among them, eyes red from the incense that burned a cloudless sky over the garden that is the empty stage.

This new heart is but a deep reflection of the restlessness that haunts the spaces where your father laughed. This new heart is the story told by Madame X in your cards. This new heart is a glyph of the trinity you will share in body, mind and spirit, that, if held carefully may deliver your dreams to reality. Even now you are the manifestation of the music, the ground his storms will blow above. When you dance your heart is a child of the moon fighting the fog with his morning, calling down the rain to release the heat and grow roots that will be harvested at noon.

Yes this will be your truth, this heart that will run the meadows in search of a lost language. You repeat back what was so well termed about the earth and sun in spiritual lust to comfort and prepare this heart. You can hear the first strains of a violin. Your chest heaves because you know this heart will be a storehouse for your burning, the story of a savior whose voice engulfs the breeze and investigates empires in their final moments and survivors. This heart is a survivor, it’s soul will charge the walls of your cave and dance in the rapture of finding dawn.

Next