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PATIENT ZERO

Love is a worried, old heart

disease, as Son House once put it, the very stuff

blues are made of, real blues

that consist of a male and female, not monkey junk

like the “Okra Blues” or “Payday Blues,”

though I think House would agree

two hearts of any persuasion are enough for a real blues,

if one of them is sick, that sickly green of a frog

bitten in two by the neighbor’s dog, all of which

makes me wonder about the source of our disease

and whose teeth first tore the heart after Adam

and Eve left the garden. Some have argued

that the first case of infection

could be traced to a carp or a stork, or maybe

even the hare, because God made them first, after all,

but the love lives of birds and fish,

even rough rabbit love, are more perfect

in their simplicity than we can ever hope to know

such do they dispense with the rituals

of courtship in short order

so much so we don’t really want to admit

the beasts and fowl and all manner of slithery thing

can truly love like us

so we label the heat of their hearts

and loins “affection” or “instinct”

or some trick of the lower brain and I think

if we are to be good scientists we must investigate

the moment when the sons of God made themselves

known to the daughters of men

before we turn up a singer strumming

a lute shaped like the goose egg

the singer’s mouth makes

every time she bends the long, mournful note

about how her angel traded his feathers

so he could walk in the skin of God’s prize creation

and in so doing became the first man she ever knew

who wasn’t full of shit

and yet was, because even though angels never eat,

her holy birdman always hemmed and hawed

when she asked point-blank

why it always took him so long to fetch a gallon

of moonlight or why he kept his wings

folded and why is it he wouldn’t crow

her name to the dawn unless the night

before she had said, Enough is enough, we’re done,

and her face had flooded and his

chest had burned cold

until the dark cracked and let a light creep through

to which he opened up and sang

in a tongue she didn’t understand but did

just enough to know their sickness

was something, and divine, and endless.