"The Body," A Weird Catastrophe Poem

                                                     The Body

         the body,
              it aches
         the body,
                  it wakes
             and moves in hallowed ways,

         "the body," it's a funny name,
                a contradiction, an objectification,
         it's your body, after all,
                   it is you,
         it's what I look for, and sometimes find,
               in a crowd,
                     in a thought,
                          in the dark, reaching,
         cemetery moonlight creeping between the
         window panes,
                 in dreams, searching,

         the body ages, it deals with time
                 and wages its own war upon us.

         and I wonder, what does the body see? 
         where does it sleepwalk? 
         which grounds have shifted below its feet?
     
                were the eyes it saw, gazing back blue and white,
         a happy mirror? a familiar gaze?
         or, simply, functions of a face? 
          
         the body drifted beyond control,
                       beyond menace,
                beyond the small, grey universe
                     it had planned for itself,
          
         and when the fear slid in, again,
                arching its back, dropping tiny drops
         of acid on the body's forehead from a great height, 
            the body knew what to do.
             I saw it stand up, move towards the wall,
                turn around and pin itself, 
                      gently, slowly, 
         but with a confidence of movement,
                   to the board it had set aside specifically
         for when that fear reared its ugly head,
         to surveil the room, hanging.

         and I wondered where in that body, if I poked and prodded, 
         would I find the woman who slayed time,
         who looks, with other blue and white eyes,
                smiling, silently,
         across oceans and eons, 
         beyond notions of marked time and eternity,
         to find me, another body, 
         momentarily looking back affixed.
          
         and I realized, then, that this is where your body ends 
         and something else begins. 
         something which turns back to see the sunrise, 
         something that feels, incomprehensibly perhaps, a radical love 
         not borne of longing or sickness,
         but of fated creation.
         something remembering, something kind, 
         something racing and chasing 
         and possessing the divine,
         something called you,

         the woman who dances,
               who falls, who considers
         and deliberates, 
         who cracks open dried out shells of 
         significance and who stretches towards the sunlight,
                     making toast in the morning,
              reading on benches,
                          watering the garden for the benefit of all,

         and when I find you there, again and again,
                 in every place, body or no,
                     on walks, on long car rides,
                wandering the halls of ancient buildings,
         terrifying,
             remembering the look you give me,
                     across time, transcending,
         something so fragile but penetrating,
               it carries me on
                         to a soul of my own,
                  giving breath to the dust,
animating the fingers that wipe clean the shelves,
          
         and my body, I, intertwined with your body, you,
                     leaps past creation and perception
                        into a happiness, a solace,
                  a quiet devotion, 
         an unexamined present, that, 
                                        in spite of 
                                        and one with 
                                        all the aches and the little wars,
                       lasts as long as these bodies do.

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