Someone looked out of their window
And said to me: the world looks
So beautiful, that I praise God
Each day for this wonderful life,
This landscape of happy creatures
And rolling fields of growth and form.
He obviously had not read Tennyson
And he wasn’t an ecologist,
For he had no firm idea of how
Ecosystems sustain themselves.
There are no beautiful surfaces
Without a terrible depth.
You said you loved me.
And I wondered what that could mean.
Beneath this pure beautiful skin
Lie the channels of life
That are busy with the rush
Of fluids.
My blood flowing through my veins
Like an Underground train.
The pus, the urine, the semen, the bile,
The phlegm, the lachrymose fluid
That pulses and dances and moves
Through the bodyscape of my life.
The rivulets, the ravines, the canals
And the streams and the pathways
That carry it all in circumnavigation.
There are no beautiful surfaces
Without a terrible depth.
When I was a child
I cut deeply into my finger
And pulled back the flesh
To reveal something beyond
The bloody face of incision
A whiteness, a solidness beneath
That upheld the façade.
And then when I ran through
Those French windows
And raised my arm
At the last moment
To deflect the blow
Of glacier-like glass
That carved through my youthful arm-skin
Instead of my adolescent face.
I walked in a daze
Back to my room
And lay on my bed
Fascinated with this flap
That felt like some discarded seaweed
Useless and static.
There was little blood, just the fatness
Of meat and muscle.
Even the pain seemed absent
Without any kind of leave.
There are no beautiful surfaces
Without a terrible depth.
And do you love all this, I wonder?
The bacteria in the ecosystem
Of my gut, my anus?
I once lay down
In the middle of an evening
All alone in my room,
And imagined my body dead.
The dissolution of substance
The lubricants of life
Dessicating, like moist soil
Drying out under a relentless sun
And then I imagined the worms
Feasting on my flesh
Helping it decay
Providing the earth with some nutrition.
And at first I was scared,
But then, as a child,
I would read scary stories
Until they lost their effect
And so I continued my meditation
Until the feeling was one of detachment.
There are no beautiful surfaces
Without a terrible depth
And do you love all this?
All this that is my body
And all this that will be my destiny?
Have you ever imagined?
We carry our thoughts around
In a goldfish bowl
Like a cauliflower
Or a mega-walnut
A damp sponge in a layer of fluidity.
We carry this around
Like an astronaut’s space helmet.
And this too will dry out
And fade away.
And when you say you love me,
Do you mean, what you see me do?
What you hear me say?
And the history that you have
Constructed of me in your brain?
There are no beautiful surfaces
Without a terrible depth
Maybe you meant
What I meant when I said
I loved you.
Maybe we should never excavate
Maybe we are not archaeologists.
Maybe there is beauty in these terrible depths.
Reply With Quote
)
