Saturday, January 25, 2014

It is enough; Gaudy Butterfly; Unvarnished truth; CC Rider



It Is Enough

To know that the atoms
of my body
will remain

to think of them rising
through the roots of a great oak
to live in
leaves, branches, twigs

perhaps to feed the
crimson peony
the blue iris
the broccoli

or rest on water
freeze and thaw
with the seasons

some atoms might become a
bit of fluff on the wing
of a chickadee*
to feel the breeze
know the support of air

and some might drift
up and up into space
star dust returning from

whence it came
it is enough to know that
as long as there is a universe
I am a part of it.
~

*
Snapshot at top is a found photo
taken by a friend of me feeding
chickadees from my hand in back
of an old hermit resident's place
off of Hy 8, three miles west of Hy 41
just south of the town of Pembine.

Note to Leland:
You will notice, beneath the sunflower seeds
that my Charles Dix ring you now have
is being worn.

See: 
http://wmkelgbthist.org/people/peo-d/dix_charles/dix-website/artist.htm








This also happened near Pembine WI

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Laid by a Monarch




A Gaudy Butterfly Laid Me


On a milkweed leaf she laid me
with no great hope of my success,
for I was just one of a hundred eggs
she deposited,
flitting, pausing, flitting, pausing,
my mother's abdomen arching
each time and putting us down;
we pinheads were merely something
that made her feel good
or the result of an act that did;
or not even that;
I don't know and will never know.

I ate my full engorgement of clean furrows
in the white-juiced leaves until I grew
to a fat temptation for predators
that eat the likes of me,
but the numbers had it
that I was one of the few who survived,
never got picked off in the hard
mandibles of life.

No,
my disappointment was different;
I spun my waxy cocoon
according to pattern
and then, alas, instead of the transformation,
the metanoia,
I had my beauty taken from me
and my capsule gradually
turned black,
and as I lay dying inside,
rotting into a fetid inkiness,

a monarch's striving nature
nonetheless living still,
my little strength merged to
poke a pinhole in the bottom
of my enbindment, and by dint
of waning force I dripped this
message onto the leaf below,
and that is how you come
to read a distillation of all
I was ever to become,

 a quotation, nothing more, but by a higher power than I:
What we have to be
Is what we are - Thomas Merton

                                  [David Dix 7/06]


.......


Unvarnished Truth

When I was a small child in the early 1940s
I would get to visit my grandparents
In Cedar Falls Iowa
And they had things there that
Greatly annoyed me
Each summer

The good things mostly offset the bad
But I am weird today because
 My grandfather used to cut the heads
Off chickens in the backyard
And he thought it was funny
When they would run after me
With their heads off

One time a headless chicken chased me
Right up the back porch steps
And beat itself against me
While I tried to escape through
A screen door that would not open
Because it was hooked on the inside

The dying chicken acted like a wind-up toy
Stuck in a corner
And it just kept thrashing against me
Until I became a different person forever
And the chicken ran down
And Grandma sped in from her garden
Like a fast ship
Her starched dress billowing like a sail

Otherwise mostly it was fun there
Except for when the peacocks wailed
Crazily in the night
And the house creaked and groaned
And I writhed under the
Hied-up bedclothes scared and sometimes
With chiggers burrowing
In my penis

Every summer I could look forward
To a nail-polished penis


The special remedy of the house
For these nasty no-see-ums
I never experienced anywhere else
But there at 2009 Clay Street
They were attracted to me

And they unfailingly established
Housekeeping in my penis
Rarely was I bitten anywhere else
It was a mind-bending horror
To suffocate bugs slowly that way
Until 6-12 came along later
Then my life through chemistry
Became a better thing
But too late for my overall future

There is no way of assessing
What lasting damage was wrought
By that chicken and the chiggers
What I might have become
 without their rude attacks
Upon my space and privacy
And that is
the unvarnished truth


[dzd]

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