Do You Know Your Heart?

[Christine McCaull]

"Support the knees, flat back, palms open to receive,
Steadily inhale through both nostrils,
Unify the two breath streams at the bindi point,
Exhale, split your air evenly out left and right,
Relax the tissues that constrain the lungs' expansion,
Make space around the brain, Dissolve."


Do You Know Your Heart, June, 2008

Stillness deludes one into thinking forms can be stable,
while secretly amplifying, magnifying

No simple thump-thump at the inner wrist, no:
a rolling, pulsing, chamber-by-chamber
4-count shimmy in the chest,

Veins at full throttle, a tap turned on rushing,
Surface tension of skin vibrating,
Molecules no longer sure of their place,

Now I am in my own cells, coursing, riding my own blood,
I am nourishment, dancing through the flesh, wiggling out
of a pore in the right forearm, I am sweat

Trumpets sound: Freedom! freedom! freedom! no more body! the soul on parole!
Up to the rooftops, treetops, an Only Planet,
Andromeda Galaxy far far away, seated at the right hand of my beloved,
on a corner in Brooklyn, in a living room loving god, with my mentor,
the child I lost, a long past benevolent face without a name

A sound meets the eardrum, sound is made in the eardrum, a birdsong, clear
and light, calls me to mate, back to the nest, back in the machine-house, back in the box
French lilacs come into the nose

Through both nostrils, to the bindi point, lilac in the lungs,
Lilac in the blood, lilac in the heart. Lilac when the gong sounds.
Lilac when I am crosslegged, seated. Lilac when the eyes open.
Lilac when the hands join in prayer. Lilac as I bow.

Lilac.