They say there are only four chambers of the heart.
I know there are five
and that fifth one opened,
not opened, but broke.
It was a pure thing, that moment.
And if my heart could kneel down
and if my spirit could call back that moment,
if my body hadn’t begun its ripening
into old age
and been also as young as the first grape in an arbor
believing in future wine, it wouldn’t.
Loneliness had to prove again
that I was only human
and there was one part of myself not yet
given.
And hearing the gnats that day in their circle above us,
the smell of earth around us,
the wild grass, altogether so natural
as if I was, we were, alive with it,
as if I was not a human separate, but earth,
part of it again,
as splendid as the deer standing in trees
or the blue dragonflies in air.
I longed to be a flowering branch,
the sea in its rocking, an unguessed world.
Even now it seems so much as if the body was only
the desire of the planet,
as if it could turn itself into the universe
both together, the same,
because such a thing is irrational flesh,
irrational earth.