heartbuilding

Billy Collins, “Aimless Love”​

This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.
 
In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.
 
This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.
 
The love of the chestnut,
the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.
 
 
No lust, no slam of the door--
the love of the miniature orange tree,
the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower,
the highway that cuts across Florida.
 
No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor--
just a twinge every now and then
 
for the wren who had built her nest
on a low branch overhanging the water
and for the dead mouse,
still dressed in its light brown suit.
 
But my heart is always standing on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.
 
After I carried the mouse by the tail
to a pile of leaves in the woods,
I found myself standing at the bathroom sink
gazing down affectionately at the soap,
so patient and soluble,
so at home in its pale green soap dish.
I could feel myself falling again
as I felt its turning in my wet hands 
and caught the scent of lavender and stone.

Billy Collins, “Aimless Love” from Nine Horses: Poems by Billy Collins, copyright © 2008 by Billy Collins. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. 
 
 
Dorianne Laux, “Heart”

The heart shifts shape of its own accord--
from bird to ax, from pinwheel
to budded branch. It rolls over in the chest,
a brown bear groggy with winter, skips
like a child at the fair, stopping in the shade
of the fireworks booth, the fat lady's tent,
the corn dog stand. Or the heart
is an empty room where the ghosts of the dead
wait, paging through magazines, licking
their skinless thumbs. One gets up, walks
through a door into a maze of hallways.
Behind one door a roomful of orchids,
behind another, the smell of burned toast.
The rooms go on and on: sewing room
with its squeaky treadle, its bright needles,
room full of file cabinets and torn curtains,
room buzzing with a thousand black flies.
Or the heart closes its doors, becomes smoke,
a wispy lie, curls like a worm and forgets
its life, burrows into the fleshy dirt.
Heart makes a wrong turn.
Heart locked in its gate of thorns.
Heart with its hands folded in its lap.
Heart a blue skiff parting the silk of the lake.
It does what it wants, takes what it needs, eats
when it's hungry, sleeps when the soul shuts down.
Bored, it watches movies deep into the night,
stands by the window counting the streetlamps
squinting out one by one.
Heart with its hundred mouths open.
Heart with its hundred eyes closed.
Harmonica heart, heart of tinsel,
heart of cement, broken teeth, redwood fence.
Heart of bricks and boards, books stacked
in devoted rows, their dusty spines
unreadable. Heart
with its hands full.
Hieroglyph heart, etched deep with history’s lists,
things to do. Near-sighted heart. Club-footed heart.
Hard-headed heart. Heart of gold, coal.
Bad juju heart, singing the low down blues.
Choir boy heart. Heart in a frumpy robe.
Heart with its feet up reading the scores.
Homeless heart, dozing, its back against the Dumpster.
Cop-on-the-beat heart with its black billy club,
banging on the lid.

Dorianne Laux, “Heart” from Smoke. Copyright © 2000 by Dorianne Laux. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions, LTD, boaeditions.org.
 
 
POETIC THEMES
            Let’s flip the script on our love objects this Valentine’s Day. Don’t worry, I’m not going to launch into a description of some kind of facile “self love.” Could anything be more sinister than the thriving “self-care” industry, with its pricey baubles and spa treatments and pleasure excursions that feed care right back into the mouth of the capitalist vortex? How instead might we use this holiday to renew our capacity for loving? These poems invite us to move away from the idea of love as aimed, directed, lusting or craving, and toward a notion of love as open receptivity.
            Billy Collins is the perfect poet to create some space for lightness and pleasure (surely this was an intention in placing Valentine’s Day at the heart of this gray month). “Aimless Love” takes us along on an adventure of falling in love with the world, opening our sense of what counts as lovable all around us. Collins’ humor charms us into falling for each and every object, from wren to dead mouse to clean white shirt. The change in feeling-state as we read one disarmingly sweet image after another is like being wooed, line by line, till we identify with Collins’ wonderful image of the heart as a bullseye target, waiting for Cupid’s next arrow. This focus on receiving love is what the poem actually enacts. In reading these lines we come to share his uncomplicated adoration for the highway that cuts across Florida, or the miniature orange tree. His disarming ability to render things lovable reaches a kind of perfection when the last stanza brings us to gaze affectionately along with him at a bar of soap, “so patient and soluble / so at home in its pale green soap dish.” He confesses, “I could feel myself falling again,” and we fall too. We can feel in our own hands the slippery stone, smell the wet scent of lavender. Perhaps Collins’ presumed aimlessness is a bit coyly disingenuous, as any good seduction always is: each line of the poem aims its arrow at the bullseye of the reader’s heart, transferring its sticky, sweet capacity for loving the world.
            Dorianne Laux takes this one step further, in a poem about falling in love with the ability to still fall in love. Learning how to dote on our heart’s capacities is fundamentally different from “self love.” It’s kind of like the far end of non-dual: we identify with what’s not us until we merge with it, achieving sufficient distance to perceive our own caring with tenderness. When the potential for love becomes the love object, the heart takes shape in natural and otherworldly form: from a sleepy bear to a curling worm to the afterworld maze of rooms and hallways for ghosts. The merging of self and other fold back in on themselves like a mobius strip, and we can fall back in love with our heart, one step removed.
                   Laux shapeshifts the heart from a mythical form with “its hundred mouths open” and “its hundred eyes closed” to the quotidian, lazy shape we take when watching movies bored. Laux seems to suggest the endless possibilities for our capacity to love, as the pace of her poem picks up to rapid fire and our heart shapeshifts from harmonica to tinsel to cement to broken teeth and on and on. One of these objects is bound to get under our skin, and by the end of the poem we are stuffed with images, maybe feeling a lot like the “Heart / with its hands full.” Whether via Laux’s wild artillery fire or Collins’ more drawn-out Cupid arrows, the images in both poems invite us to engage our heart’s capacity to fall back in love with the world. When we do, we don’t actually need diamonds or flowers or greeting cards, because we are already replete.
 
 
PRACTICE
            Riffing on the image of the heart as a bullseye, I’d like to adopt a psychodrama technique taught by Leticia Nieto. Nieto adapted this group exercise for individual practice to accommodate the online format of Transformative Change’s  Embodied Social Justice Summit. I’m adapting it further to synch with this week’s theme of the skills required for loving. Please note: this is NOT an exercise on the skills required for drawing. If, like me, you’re no artist, just use chicken-scratches like stick figures and simple symbols.
            *Begin by drawing a circle on a piece of paper, and at the bullseye, draw your heart.
            *Label it with a name that stands in for a special quality you identify in your soul of souls, or in a version of you from your past—one that is central to your capacity for loving but does not receive adequate reinforcement in your life (for example: vulnerability, courage, softness, confidence, trust, joy).
            *Identify the specific people or phenomena that have challenged or undermined this quality (what Nieto calls “the pulls”). Draw them outside the circle, and then draw lines connecting them to the heart at its center. It’s best to choose for these figures not vague, overarching phenomena such as patriarchal white supremacist culture, but its incarnation in the people places and things from your personal history. Like that creepy church your great-aunt dragged you to, or that vicious fourth grade math teacher. Wassup, Mrs. Avery.
            *“Resource the circle with auxiliaries,” in the language of psychodrama, by populating the inside of the circle with companions. (Like supportive figures from childhood; objects from nature, elements from your upbringing or ancestry; or communities you feel safe in. So much love to that Arizona hotel housekeeper who saw my 13-year-old Queer potential and introduced me to Suzanne Vega.)
            *Jot down a few key lines that encapsulate the demand or pressure being placed upon the heart quality by each figure outside the circle. (For example, the accusation that your laziness makes you unlovable; that if you cry, you’re weak; or that you’re worthless unless you win. I’d give my mom a line I still can’t shake, “Only boring people get bored.”)
            *Scan the field on this “map of pulls” to imaginatively place yourself at the center, holding the connective threads (as you would do in a live group exercise). Physically mime holding imaginary cords in your hands so that you can experience what it would feel like to let them go. To ritualize this, speak aloud the lines you have written—the pull being made—and enact the experience of actually physically setting the cord free with your hands, releasing that pull. You might become aware of which of these cords are particularly hard to let go—the more “gnarly elements” as Nieto puts it. These ties probably live deep in the body, wrapped up in personal and/or ancestral history. What is the energy or charge that arises when we dialogue with these pulls? What is the emotional quality or body sensation that comes up?
          Give yourself some time to breathe and integrate the experience.
          When I first did this exercise, the snipped cords recalled an early nightmare image of mine from some movie where an astronaut is floating alone into space after his line to the mothership was snipped. I’ve been balancing this feeling using a Kundalini yoga technique where you visualize a snakelike coil of energy at the base the spine, rising up the central axis of the body and winding around the heart center. Perhaps imagine the gnarly cords on your map instead as golden threads, and you are sucking them back into your body with each inhale, hoovering spaghetti style, reclaiming them and wrapping them around the spool of your Suzanne Vega heart, your boring-because-bored heart, your fuck-long-division heart. Give your heart some volume. Bolster it. Make it sturdy and real and thick. Maybe this process of heartbuilding will lend you new eyes for what’s lovely and enticing all around you. I think of love scenes you see in the cartoons, where somebody’s eyes shoot big hearts all over the place, usually with a sound that’s something like “A-OOOO-GA!” May you see your world this Valentine’s Day with Billy Collins aooga goggles.