Marck L. Beggs will be reading and performing for us on Tuesday, Sept. 18 at 6:00 p.m. Marck has been generous with us and agreed to share a bit of his poetry in advance of his reading. Check out this fabulous poem and then show up on Tuesday the 18th to hear some more, along with some of Marck's music as well.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF
MY HEART
It was first
discovered in a muddy shoebox
by a girl named
Patsy in a field of wild poppies
in Northern
California. Patsy, and her friend Lulu,
strolled hand in
hand along Cattail Creek,
crossing the field
to pick me up
on the way to
school. That’s when
Patsy tripped over
the box, and my heart
spilled out,
staining her shoes. According
to Lulu, she
screamed in delight.
They carried it all
the way to me that morning,
tossing it back and
forth like a slippery ball.
I was very happy to
have it back, especially
since I had been
utterly unaware of its existence.
The next day,
however, Patsy and Lulu
discovered some bad
mushrooms
and were whisked off
to the hospital
to get their
stomachs pumped.
They never crossed
that field again.
*
In junior high,
beneath a late afternoon
fall of aurora borealis, Mary Zumwalt
gathered my heart
into a specimen container.
I was in the
library, diagramming sentences,
when she and her
posse appeared at the window,
their voices lilting
through the opaque winter air:
Would
you like to swing on a star?
And
carry Marck Beggs home in a jar?
I felt, at once,
released and trapped,
and I responded with
all the grace
and thoughtfulness
of a stick.
Clearly, my tender
brain concluded, the heart
exists outside of
the individual, among alternative
laws of time and
space, where any passersby
could simply reach
out and poke it
or squeeze it. And so I loaned it out
to all the
inarticulate dolts populating the landscape
like spring
mold. I became their private Cyrano,
writing
love-drenched missives to their beautiful girlfriends
who would never even
learn my name.
But they knew my
words and would recite them
to each other by
their lockers between classes,
my heart passing
between them
as easily as
handshakes and stolen glances.
*
In college, I
started hanging out with my brain
and all of its
nefarious friends and influences:
alcohol, Eliot,
coffee, bohemians, Kafka, peyote,
Zappa, sugar,
politics, and computers.
Somewhere off in the
shadows, my heart
stood by and watched
as I fumbled through
a maze of women,
their names a litany of brilliance, cruelty,
promises, and
lies. Through decades of neglect,
my heart never
complained, never judged,
as my brain went on
terrible rampages,
cutting through
relationships like slave labor
in a rain forest,
leaving behind burnt ruins
as my poor, sad
heart wandered aimlessly to nowhere.
