The Heart’s Laboratory by Stephen Oliver

You must read words
to be reminded of them.

Left alone they are rabble, argumentative, a calm
or crazy half-remembered message
of some forgotten incident,
or people.

Whatever heart you have visited,
someone passed that way before.

Silk road of remembrance.

How humanizing it is to half-turn and glimpse –
as if to say,
‘Trust me, again’.

The small discoveries one makes of the moment
are soon forgotten – deafened

by the blood’s quiet tumult,
that roar in the ears via the heart’s laboratory.

A plane-shadow snatches a tree; Autumn

From: Oliver, Stephen, “The Heart’s Laboratory” in Snorkel, No.7, 2008.
(https://webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/20080521224553/http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/84567/20080522-0833/www.snorkel.org.au/002/oliver.html)

Date: 2008

By: Stephen Oliver (1950- )

Tags: 2008, poetry, stephen oliver, the heart’s laboratory, you must read words