Hearts in Which the Movements of Worlds Are Bound and Ruptured

The eyes of chickens, pretty lunations, and you, do you light up the fruit? Though you meant to scale the hairy cliffs of raspberry-colored syllables, who are you but masked voice speaks sliddery
on perverse side of screen?       

                                    Nor are they with you, the sacred touchers,
like the white inner tissues sailing south in the milk-weed,
though weed you are, not ripe hip of Florida
                                    in the peregrine pumpkin seed.

In a wooden box the color of the sun’s urine
(orange-dark, sickroom stink: don’t turn away, not this time),
they are beating on the walls—how many? so many?—
the likes you would not stop yesterday to carry.

Across and across cerise your breath draws the black streak
           of the last conversation you had before you woke to find her
dead: “I don’t know. Two o’clock? Three? Try to sleep.”

Hearts in which the movements of worlds are bound and ruptured
all unbound now and whose this whim whose groves dead at night
what birds startle when the copper leaves rush at them?

      Shadow mounts the top row of windows in the Palazzo Vecchio;
                                 mounts the oversized clock; mounts the tower.

      And you,
               heart like a long scissor,
      were you here with her

            that first summer after college?
      Can you not remember were you nobody sensible?

                The pizzeria’s coral table cloths, the red
                geraniums, the table lamps slightly
               brighter in the withering daylight, like loudening frogs—

do they look familiar? And if they did?

How late it is to fetch back the pearls, those unpracticed swimmers,
scattered now in the movements of the worlds.
—Cal Bedient

Cal Bedient is a professor at UCLA and the author of several books of literary criticism and two books of poetry, Candy Necklace and The Violence of the Morning.

Originally published in the summer 2005 issue of Boston Review