Where, oh Heart, is the answer?
In man’s olive iris that pines
capsule of soulish vines stretching

by the water in that memory…
First pink touch: the long name,
Which you say is so
easy on the eye

In catching dim fair soft lights
blown in gloom’s silver odds

between two old pages or
News soaked in a gray ink drop bath:
The blending of war broken out on earth’s cheek
With the gossiping red margins and
Something eerie on the last page…

I step on it, walking straight.

In still mindfully begging
Oval windows on the church ramparts:
 Is it in the epoch
          Womanhood?
In the sore ******, in the sore slits
            Dribbling pollen of wounds of
            Nickings, gyps, slights, losses

Is it in a stasis
Forested with chocolate and sisters
Purpled bedtime music boxes
Dreaming or in the moment I
Stir my bland corners with song
            Not in victories banners cheering
            Hunched labor in running
            Something we get when winning

Is it in a process
That wrinkles like skin, then spots
            Or hangs over the path
            A great moss and changing
the wintery company of foliage and twig to
fire and blossom,
in the birth of death and growing?

is it in kissing or eating before praying
like guilt yellow as bruised pear hips
that melt to brown in your fingers

Should I see or hear or feel it
in the man himself, meat of his fine muscles,
his heart's voice, the buried hunger pang,
it speaks
or in his prayer's slow sadness,
black as the tomb's passage and
can you answer?