Furious Ruth/ My Swimming Heart

Furious Ruth

Rough hewn

medicine woman

cutting out fires and riding low tracing

clouds

She scatters them from her teeth

the ones she harvested

from her garden yesterday

boiled, stewed, becoming lines

to map her trails

through woods along her way

Grandmother, fury, steady hands

Old woman wanderer and beating

back the brambles with sharp eyes

but the wit, a sting that bites

more cunning still and keeps

the old man running

with that twinkle in his eye

***

My Swimming Heart

If you break your ribs

for the fluttering

that they contain within,

all the passions

that painted vividly

will bleed through

colorless

and then

nothing will contain

the dulling,

drumming

of the deadened sense

Let the mangroves

stay the crocodile

from the heart

played not

on a field for hunting

nor for thrashing,

violently against a cage;

in the moments

that we flutter through the windows

of another's

to find a home in theirs

is to live beyond

all sense,

all passions,

to find ourselves within

is to leave the self

and float away