Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

The Law of Wine

Is not in the grape
or the earth
in the nose or time
or beauty of words
unable to describe the wine
but in cracking the heart loose
at its edges
just enough to let sunlight
beneath its serious face
to illuminate the smile within
the glass's umbrous curve
the little bit of rest
that moves us towards chaos
and acceptance
towards the slight opening
in the clenched world.

The Law of the Wound

Is a wound still a wound
on a dead body?

Does it straddle the enormous distance
between death and dead?

In 1946 at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem
seven churns together

made one whole man
a complete bomb.

It is said here of the dead
that no bodies remained

but wounds were many.

One wound stretched from a beautiful woman¹s idea
twenty years ago about loving a man

to the last moment she glanced
at her daughter¹s face.

At breakfast.
Now it is night

and those wounds sent out fifty seven years ago
to wander

are still fresh on the water
and bread of the world.

A wound never remains on a dead body.
It migrates to a heart that remembers it

and feeds it.

The Law of Common Hearts

Life exists within a small range 
of temperatures.
                        -Lisa Heschong

Most hearts are caught forever
between childhood and maturity,
unable without reason to expect love,
unable without expectation to give it.

Even the most subtle variation in circumstances
will affect the life of these hearts.

The careless word, the minute movement
from zero to one, the flicker of eyes
as they look slightly away
from the lover's face

Even inconvenience.
Even oddness.

How might these vessels be fired
to withstand extremes
of hot and cold,
to hold?

How might hearts be warmed then cooled
then warmed again without breaking?

They must understand the kiln is made
of what once was the vessel.
They must be made to see the brevity
of the vessel and the eternity of what it holds.

Love pours out of our hearts
as we are the water that pours into the clay.

And this regardless
of whether the pot
is metal, plastic, glass.
It's all death with life in it.

MTC Cronin has published seven books and three booklets of poetry, the most recent being <More or Less Than> 1 100 (Shearsman Press, UK, 2004). Her 2001 book, Talking to Neruda¹s Questions, has been translated into Spanish by Juan Garrido Salgado for publication by SAFO in Chile and a collection of her work is being translated for publication in Macedonia. Cronin worked in the 1990s in the field of law (specializing in feminist jurisprudence) and, more recently, teaching literature and creative writing in the Department of Writing, Social & Cultural Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. She is currently working on a Ph.D. with a focus on "poetry and law." She lives in Maleny in the hinterland of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia with her partner and their three young daughters.
MTC Cronin:  "The Law of Wine," first appeared in Law and Literature and then in Poets on Drugs (DiVerse, 2003); it was performed at the Police & Justice Museum, A History of Drugs, in 2003. "The Law of the Wound" first appeared in The Australian.