Pausing for Some Poetry

We're getting packed up this morning, ready to head back home after the better parts of a couple of weeks up north. It's hectic: laundry, packing, clean-up. Y'know. 

But there's still some time for poetry!

(My view across the road . . . as the sun was going down last night.)

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The Human Heart
Campbell McGrath

We construct it from tin and ambergris and clay,
   ochre, graph paper, a funnel
   of ghosts, whirlpool
in a downspout full of midsummer rain.

It is, for all its freedom and obstinance,
   an artifact of human agency
   in its maverick intricacy,
its chaos reflected in earthly circumstance,

its appetites mirrored by a hungry world
   like the lights of the casino
   in the coyote's eye. Old
as the odor of almonds in the hills around Solano,

filigreed and chancelled with flavor of blood oranges,
   fashioned from moonlight,
   yarn, nacre, cordite,
shaped and assembled valve by valve, flange by flange,

and finished with the carnal fire of interstellar dust.
   We build the human heart
   and lock it in its chest
and hope that what we have made can save us.

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My best wishes to all of you . . . for a weekend filled with peace and solace, time to rest -- and things that bring you joy. (And maybe some poetry, too.) 

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Today's poem was published in Nouns & Verbs: New and Selected Poems, Campbell McGrath, Ecco, 2019.  Information about the poet can be found here.