Day 549: Animal Heart

 

I love the last lines of this poem - that address the heart as a kind of animal. Despite all its hurts, 'the sore, battered, foundered' heart is still a wild animal,  'snorting' and 'stamping' in its stall, desperate to get loose, and 'still faithful' to the idea of love. Like a bull or a bucking bronco, ready to take its owner on a hell of a ride- ie, love.

Love: Beginnings - CK Williams
 
They’re at that stage where so much desire streams 
between them, so much frank need and want,

so much absorption in the other and the self and the 
self-admiring entity and unity they make—

her mouth so full, breast so lifted, head thrown back so far 
in her laughter at his laughter,  

he so solid, planted, oaky, firm, so resonantly factual in 
the headiness of being craved so,

she almost wreathed upon him as they intertwine again, 
touch again, cheek, lip, shoulder, brow,

every glance moving toward the sexual, every glance 
away soaring back in flame into the sexual—

that just to watch them is to feel again that hitching in 
the groin, that filling of the heart,

the old, sore heart, the battered, foundered, faithful heart, 
snorting again, stamping in its stall.