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Feeling at Home in the Body

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for Robert Creeley

     My friend, this body goes on and on through the pineywoods. I don’t know where we are.... I know only that sometimes I love the trunk of a pine, and if I go that way, I admire the grandeur of created things, the stout pillars, roofed with a marble band, and I walk into the courtyard of a wooden temple, and a woman comes with me.

     I hear on the instrument of my body what is remembered and forgotten a thousand times. Snow is falling on top of other snow.... The atmosphere around the earth from which the snow falls has its own desire.... and I see fishermen kneeling by wood fires in the cold, snow all around the house, and the light of the womb leads me.

     This body is crowded around me; the thumb with its nail is so curious bending over the top of the journal page, as I write this, as a calf over a high manger, or a chicken looking down into a jewellery box. The soft face of the thumb knows it sees more than the first knuckle, it can look far into the future of the human body. Well then, thumb, where are we going now?


 

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