One Body

Whether we ascribe to Adam and Eve

created on the 6^th day before God took a break

or some other creation story creating “us,” in other images,

even to Darwin’s theory, from single cell swimming

to crawling from the water onto land, from ape

to man, adapting, evolving, moving up the food chain,

it doesn’t matter, for regardless, we are here, all of us,

arms and legs and heads with brains, fingers

and toes, dexterity to grasp and lift, to make tools

and fire as we move freely about, bi-pedal and mobile,

searching for ourselves to sustain us and family, youth

born to perpetuate us, and continue, advancing, resembling us

and perhaps our maker, too, poised well above us, something

greater for us to seek, to worship and adore, and never fully understand,

but something there beyond ourselves and our flawed humanity,

some unattainable perfection, some morality that we strive for,

and fail, yet we devote our lives to finding it, absolving some original

sin or achieving the pinnacle of our evolutionary selves, always reaching,

though not alone, left to flounder and stumble and to die a cruel death,

but striving with our own kind, seeking together, united by our humanity,

in kindness, sympathy and mercy, unselfish courage and integrity and value,

self-aware and wholehearted, rational and free to choose rightly,

one body of humanity, holy, blessed, passionate: one body;

hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions,

fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject

to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed

and cooled by the same winter and summer; and the questions asked,

          If you prick us, do we not bleed?

                    If you tickle us, do we not laugh?

                              If you poison us, do we not die?

yes, one body, one humanity, in search of nothing more

than life’s ending and its final reward, a resting place

with the universe of mankind, as one body, one humanity.

August Heat

 August heat here lies

sweltering, leaden’d

on a layer of sodden air;

and wraps itself in flannel

by the season’s end.

Education

 

Growing up, we had our own emergency drills,

shuffling to the halls and curling into little balls

with our hands over our heads against

some distant people we knew little about,

but it was a part of being in school,

like math and science and art, and recess;

and the President was shot, and I couldn’t

understand why my sister was crying

because I was only nine and “the President”

was foreign to me, some unknown person

in a city I’d never visited, couldn’t find on a map,

though I’d heard its name and his;

and Carol Savage moved away in the 2^nd grade,

love gone forever, save for my parents and a stuffed

elephant I’d been born with who would never leave me,

but I found love again in Junior High, or perhaps

what passed for love in Junior High, a new vocabulary,

only to finally figure it out much later, and the pain

that goes with it, and the loneliness of lost love

learned and new love found carried forward to adulthood,

wondering, always wondering, the whats and the whys of life

and love; and a war raged on, brought to us live

into our living rooms on a small black and white

screen showing the carnage and the protests

decrying the loss of life and liberties, freedoms

taken away, perhaps even lost forever in another land

on the other side of the world, a land

of rice paddies and names we couldn’t pronounce,

and what remained was sent home in a box

to be buried, a name etched on a wall,

so we joined the crowds and marched, sat in,

tuned out, and raised our signs, resisted, spent a night

in jail or a lifetime in Vietnam, changed,

chained even by memories that never go away,

even as we retire to our front porches, remembering

“the good old days,” and Carol Savage, love lost

in the second grade and the silly drills of school,

little human balls fearing what we didn’t know;

but now we know …;

and the knowing isn’t easier to understand,

easier to face unafraid, any easier than it was before

when we covered our heads or cried ourselves to sleep,

when things didn’t make sense but we rose up against them

or picked up a gun and lay down our lives,

all for naught, for what we learned was fear,

what we learned was to be afraid.

Store Front

I had just passed by that same spot,

and looking back, saw a man staring

intently into a store front window,

the exact spot where all I saw,

walking fast on my way somewhere,

too busy to stop, as I have now, though,

delayed by stopping, was my own face

reflected at a glance, a warped image

of myself, darkly detailed, just that

and nothing more, myself flat

against a warped street and the bank

warped across the way, darkly

detailed, too, barely distinguished

from the warped images reflected there.

But he stared so intently, looking

beyond the glass at something, and waved,

his elbow a pivot point, his hand wavering

back and forth, ecstatic, and pointing

with his other hand, tapping the glass,

leaving behind his fingerprints smeared

and smudged, a tell-tale sign of lingering,

stopped and looking, me, too, now

standing here intently watching him, wondering

what had stopped him there, what had I missed

in rushing past, passing by in my haste.

Perhaps, it was myself I missed, a younger self

peering in, clearly reflected, seeing someone I knew,

old friends, new friends lost, or something

I’d always wanted, the train set I never got,

the wind-up toy that whirled and whirred,

whimsy, or the simple beauty found in a smile,

the play of light and dark on a canvas painted,

or perhaps it was a child waving first, the funny man

rushing by, the funny man waving back, stopping.

Purple Finch

The purple finch is not purple,

not the ones at my feeder feeding,

more of a red than purple, but not

like cardinals’ or red-breasted robins’

red, too bright or a rusted breastplate;

maroon perhaps, which is

a purple of sorts, sort of, though not

the purple of lilacs or the grapes

crushed to wine, nor the Merlot

or Cabernet they become, fermented,

dry wines made better with the passing

of age and shared with friends,

as I share this finch with you now,

a finch of its own color, this purple finch

feeding at my feeder, sharing himself,

and leading me away from the dull

matte of my summer days winding down

and the approaching autumn of life,

to take wing and fly away,

and return.