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

It Is Enough

by Anne Alexander Bingham

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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