This body is good
for the moment that you share with me. If it were a coupon,
it wouldn't be good for any date in the future.
It's useless for looking at in the mirror, for appraising in any
manner except in the sense that we are close to each other.
It is for deep breaths, kisses on the tip of the nose, playing with your earlobe.
You're my man. My dark haired angel, woods runner, spirit holder.
Smile sweet satisfaction, comfort, and I am tired. Last night, coming home
from the gym, under the majestic November maples,
I understood that there is no deluge of life events
that one can avoid or defer. There will be no waiting.
In a now-decaying northern town engineers built a system of locks to
make the rapids of the St. Mary's River navigable for freighters, imposed
order and humanness on forests and glacial lakes.
Meanwhile, waves from Lake Superior lap against the shore like
a song I knew before I was even born. Huge forces, physical
and ideological, pick us up under the arms and set us down
in places we must learn to occupy.
I work so hard to humble myself before them, but softening is slow work.
When doubt comes I take up Marge Piercy's plea for utility, for a place
to start, fulfilling work to be done.
Take this body, a quiet offering; let me start here, with you today.
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No matter our ideas, our ability to transcend physicality, to dream beyond limits, to house multiple infinities in the mind without being able to physically move into them; we are matter; our ideas are tethered to our materiality —there is a complex relationship, an exchange of vibrations from the different languages of materiality/solidity and the electromagnetic transmission that is thought, idea. Physically, we can perceive the limits of reach, achieving a form of unlimitedness with a stretch of the mind, though it is an elastic stretch; the flexible tether of the brain pulls idea back into itself, into the thought factory of the mind —it is indeed good for something, at least something that can take the form of comfort, of liking the limited body for an ability to transmit, to dream beyond a limit.
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