![]() The Body
has its little hobbies. The lung likes its air best after supper, goes deeper there to trade up for oxygen, give everything else away. (And before supper, yes, during too, but there’s something about evening, that slow breath of the day noticed: oh good, still coming, still going ... ) As for bones—femur, spine, the tribe of them in there—they harden with use. The body would like a small mile or two. Thank you. It would like it on a bike or a run. Or in the water. Blue. And food. A habit that involves a larger circumference where a garden’s involved, beer is brewed, cows wake the farmer with their fullness, a field surrenders its wheat, and wheat understands I will be crushed into flour and starry-dust the whole room, the baker sweating, opening a window to acknowledge such remarkable confetti. And the brain, locked in its strange dual citizenship, idles there in the body, neatly terraced and landscaped. Or left to ruin, such a brain, wild roses growing next to the sea. The body is gracious about that. Oh, their scent sometimes. Their tangle. In truth, in secret, the first thing in morning the eye longs to see. From Volume 188, Number 3, June 2006 Copyright © The Poetry Foundation |