Gifts
       

Nature overcompensates:
the dicephalics, for instance,
or those additional vertebrae,
surplus molars, extra digits,
one more finger or toe
just for good measure, and here,
here is another five-chambered heart.

As if there is never enough,
like the patients of good will
who cannot bring enough red wine,
garlic necklaces, daily calendars
with inspirational quotations
given from gratitude,
or admiration, or from the one
last and only hope

they bring other things,
they bring themselves.

It is the excess of the well-intentioned,
the camping outfitter who overfits,
the granger who overfeeds
for a winter that will never come.
The effusions of a heart pumping wildly
behind the heart, with more imagination
than any body can bear.

Tweet

Copyright © 2016 Michael Gessner All rights reserved
from Selected Poems
FutureCycle Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission