Living the Life Inside and Beyond the Skin, with Ecstatic Kindness

It so happens
when I wake
I touch life
at its root
and am happy
in retrospect
the body is
not was

In such straits the horses come quickly from the other side of the fence where the grass grows highest when they do not need to stand under the shed and out of the rain even when it snows. The hired man has his eye on the wife in the largest cabin on the downward slope. She makes motions toward returning next summer. He appears pleased since his smile widens like thunder in the distance with rain streaking the horizon. Rainwalking it’s called. He has had no pleasure in many years. He had hoped the coyotes behind the house would thrive, but no, they are dying one after the other from sheer grief, unable to get through the wire surrounding them ever since they were uprooted from the wild and brought here as cubs.

In the middle
of the pasture
she sheds bra
and panties
and her man,
the one with her,
puts her on film
moving slowly

If I touch life at the root I have no other way to love a woman save through the avenues of my eyes. Such is the plaint of the widower. The man of whom I speak is unaware I am taking his measure. He will want to live longer now. He will live on and become a hundred, I hope. The young nurse loves him. He is the love of her life. He is fifty years older. I think a time machine has its uses. He has to have his sex, she says. She makes love on her knees, and he lives once more as he did in the days when he was free of children and too young for old age. He likes to be up early in deep winter to see the snow fall on the weeds that have taken the place of flowers. She will be here soon. He touches himself until he stays touched.

What if I slept
with you there
and did not wake
until my body
flowering
overflowed
flooding our skin
with rivers

You know what it will be like on the other side because you have so many loved ones living there, they must be happy, you never hear from them anymore where once their letters arrived one after the other as quickly as I could write one from this side and expect it to be delivered, and I was never wrong how I knew they would welcome my very ancient words, those one read like a soliloquy, the kind we grew up hearing, the Guild Theatre mausoleum London no longer uses the way the graves support New Orleans by floating on the watery beds where the French sold their citizens to the Spanish who sold themselves, both men and women, to the Americans, who buy and sell the earth once the world approves their loan.

(4 October 2010)