Poem 387

This is the most miserable poem I ever wrote, its deep despair unmitigated … heart rot is a fungal infection that attacks trees from the inside … here it’s a metaphor for someone’s pre-dawn realisation that a wound from the past has over time invisibly and silently hollowed them out … just as a fallen tree trunk in the bush looks whole until you step on it so this person realises they are in effect the walking dead … bears some similarity (but more of a dark twin) to Poem 74 …

( with stiff frill of a heart I’m thinking of those fungal outgrowths on trees, a heart’s weight in worms is a truly disturbing image, I like the small metal voices of the larvae, the image of being invaded and held up by the brilliant flower of mould that replaces your original internal structure, being colonised and ossified by creeping trauma … )

Heart Rot

In the glove of early morning
wearing the headdress of spring
like wet wood that falls apart
my stiff frill of a heart
wakes me

I had thought the damage was less
but as simply as this I am unhealed

lie back lie still
nothing wants to harm you
but you did
you were the corrosion of water
the drenching years

I can walk on forever with your larvae
bowing delicately one to another inside me
it is their ticking speech I hear in the dark morning
calculating the loss of a step
or a heart's weight in worms

your foot must puncture the tree
before you see it is dead
I have lain here on the floor of the forest
forgetting from where I have fallen
wrapped in a cold roll of leaves
I have dreamed until the black dawn
pricked me within
the small metal voices still into agreement
their march begins
the brilliant flower of mould bears me up
and explores me

my heart must break like a crust
before I see why I am dead
while you sleep on beside me
I listen
listen to the rain instead