What does my heart know?

Question

MY HEART KNOWS

My heart knows
emotional hollows . . .

. . . hears echos as she goes . . .
. . . and she goes . . .

intravenously
through liquid canyons
saying
ping
ping
ping . . .

Like sonar
on a submarine

She is poised
and listening . . .

For depth charges

Torpedoes

Eerie whistling

Just before
They all come visiting.

My heart knows everything
of the slim possibilities

Obese unpredictabilities
of love.

Hollows aren't nests.

But my heart's readiment
makes up the rest.

Margot
1971
copyright

Drew, I've read EmeraldIsle's comments. Yours are far more penetrating. I agree with you that the ending is "hollow," which is a bit ironic, considering the use of the word in the poem. At the same time, I thought the ending expressed hope in the face of fear. I.E., that being "ready" for the pain of love won over the certainty of the pain. Now I'm thinking that ending came off more like a throw-away or loss of creative steam than the statement it was meant to be. It is flat. Thanks for your comments.

Answer 1

Interesting short poem, thought provoking too!
When I perused through, I had this initial salacious reaction focussed on the question: why the gendered "she" and not simply the more neuter "it" in;

. . . hears echos as she goes . . .
. . . and she goes . . .

and who or what are "they" in:

Just before
They all come visiting.

and why do they visit? and why this fact: "Hollows aren't nests"?

Then, I checked whether these words are unique to the poem, "unpredictabilities" and "readiment."

Finally, I glanced at the period when the poem was presumably composed and hearkened to the "Eerie whistling" and the periodic, "ping ping ping ." The consonance "p" matched the period with its alliterative, unpredictable periods!
Thought about "slim possibilities" that surely, that is what your heart knows, has known since the "ping" began the flow "intravenously/ through liquid canyons."

Answer 2

I've actually followed EmeraldIsle's advice for most of my life. It has its advantages -- chiefly that when I die as an old and justly famous author (ha!), there will be no journals, no correspondence, no early work of any kind for my money-grubbing publishers to find and publish to my posthumous embarrassment -- but on the whole I regret not saving my writing from when I was young. Every so often I do find something that's fallen through the cracks, so to speak, something that I never threw away; the connection, not only to the past, but to an unrecoverable naivete, a sense of wonder, is something that I wish I could experience more often. While some of my early poems and stories are pretentious, ignorant, inarticulate, or otherwise embarrassing, I would rather that I still had them. A couple of the pieces I found recently were actually quite good in their own way.

Just throwing that out there.

On the poem: I like the sense of the heart as a physical organ, which is at odds with the romantic notion of the "heart" as some kind of abstract soul-like inner being. Combining the two, as you do, is an interesting notion. I think that the assurance that "my heart's readiment / makes up the rest" rings a little hollow in this context -- it feels like an odd sort of bravado. Kind of bittersweet, really.

Answer 3

You wrote this when you were very young, I hope. It's usually best just to toss that stuff out when you move, etc.