If I Had a Heart by Silvatiicus Riddle
They say because I do not have a heart,
I cannot love.
Love. I do not know this word. It is foreign
to a monster like me: creature of the land, forest-dweller,
rock-troll, ogre. “Bogs,” whispered the townsfolk,
when they’d see me gathering herbs in the evening light;
they crossed themselves as they spoke. “Bogs have more depth
than the soul of that beast; with his skin made of river-peat,
and his brain all apple-rot. They are heartless things, ogres,
and they know nothing of love.” I caught their words
like soured rain, collected in the bowl of my oversized ears.
I suppose it is true, for I know nothing of love; I feel at home
among river rocks; my face tea-stained by the heat of Summer’s Day.
And in the grove of standing oaks, when the damp sets in
from a fog that’s lingered on the moors too long
in my den of hollowed wood and wiry moss—it’s true—
I think that I can smell
the apple-rot.
But, I go on living anyway, like an earthbound thunderhead
swollen with fish heads, and mushrooms, and shame,
lumbering over the hills in pursuit of butterflies—quickly! Quickly!
Perhaps too quickly, I’m sorry. It is only that my chest fluttered
with every turn and tumble of kaleidoscopic wings, flower to flower,
Oh! I wish to float like them, to leave no trace. To be invisible as wind,
as the ghosts that drift between leaves when the sun goes down.
My footfall cuts a language of apologies between flowers,
pock-marks on the face of the red-iron clay
and earth.
In the Fall they come with torches and shouts,
burn the woods with a prayer on their tongue, in the name
of a god I’ve never seen. All around I heard the bodies of pine burst,
the yarrow and fern hiss into ash. Some spirits flee, swimming the roots,
the fungi, the damp and the rot, toward safety. The elders always stay.
I stay too, call away a nest of rabbits, sleeping birds, knocking
the dreaming things into a whirlwind of wingbeats, racing the smoke
to sky. I watch the salamanders slither from the flames; foolish men
thinking that fire itself is not, too, a strange
and hungry god.
In the first days of Spring that follow, I receive a gift:
dried foot of sparrow, left behind in the dirt.
I tie it up with yellowed knot—twisted vine of kudzu,
and hang it among sun-rusted grasses that fall
soft from my crown.
Later, I find my twin in the pond, where he lives and never leaves;
the audacity of him! My silent mirror, casting back all that I am!
The soft grasses, foot of sparrow, all there. “Do you know,”
I begin, tracing the moss-laden frame of his face. It’s large,
shimmering like a star in the ripples of morning light. “Do you know
of love? What is it? Where can I find such a thing
in all the woods?” A doe bows for a drink across the way.
“Did you keep it all for yourself, brother of mine? Friend?
When first we misted the air with our barbaric cries; crawling
out of the cave, into the vast and greenlit world?”
He replies in kind, in the soft lapping of deer; slips away
‘neath a dark map of tadpoles.
If I had a heart—
perhaps I would carry it around in a satchel on my chest,
or in a vial on my throat. I’d never hide it, never keep
it to myself; it would surely be grand—an ogre’s heart
like a spirit-light plucked from the mountains; like a burning star.
All the forest would be reflected in its face; the world
would know—at last! of its own beauty. If I had a heart, I think—oh.
I’d be an invitation and not a threat. My step would resound
without gasps, but auspicious bells—I’d be someone.
And know how to love.