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.
~
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.
~
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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