tiny hearts (rev 1)

You don't want this prayer to ignite.
Not of one who lies on a cardboard bed.
Not of one whose body has turned to hackberry bark.
Every night the red heart in the small glass bird flickers
and I wish to bury the bird on a morning
when its wings are not flapping in me. It is the last
week of warm April and I try not to dream of the incendiary
tulips that flame orange and red and infect my eyes.
My legs drag like thick roots, pulled without artistry,
and I keep giving myself to you as the incorrect yes –
an insect pressed into rainy air, a song for the why not of death.
How did I learn to come back from breathing
the river, that lonely submerged city, watching in
my silty clothes as carp jumped and broke the water's surface
with such unconcerned fluency? I have wanted to be those fish.

I have wanted to live unrehearsed, and not have the sun,
turned up high on the budding maples, make me despair
for its beauty every day. But I am an old fire. My ashes
will bless my own forehead when I die. My father is king
of the underground and I want to kiss the letter of surrender God
placed under his breastbone. Surely his heart defrosted long ago to
spring's rhythmic drip of water from the blind snow above. But
my father only stares at the walls of his coffin and so I wear a
rosemary bloom upon my chest that I cut away to resemble his heart.
I prattle with night prayers. I sleep to get rid of my body.
When this year began, I was sitting under a half-slice
of moon in quiet’s field, my angel for the asking
pinching herself shut in the sky. I needed only a lucky accident,
my numb fingers burrowing in the snow,
tying hearts in the dead clover, as if that would bring me love again.