Burning Instead of Beauty

Or, a stem so thin the air becomes the stem, and a beak

           would only mean that something is warm behind it,

and what good is that in autumn when the leaves

become the little sisters of sparrows?

It remains the valley, a part of the land.

           It becomes a field of white blossoms blown

from the tree of wind, from the trawler's nets,

           and as we walk the boiled lip of the beach

the fog thickens and we become less and less ourselves

           and for a moment we are lost among the waves,

among the leaves, and we've really gone nowhere

           but it feels like something has happened, that we've gone beyond

everything, that our bodies, fragile and alone,

are finally where they need to be.

It's a false voyage, of course, because when the body

is no longer ours, we take from it.

How dull and purple it is, raked clean, sponged and sewn.

          Sad even, in its own way, when it finally becomes just a body,

and we return to what reminds us of it.

Heart: oxen knee-deep in a canal.

          Tissue: blanket of silt, blanket of snow.

Lung: tracks of an otter through an oyster bed.

Brain: monsoon . . . cello strings . . . the beginnings of songs.

Easy because decay slowly begins with our body's beginning.

Slow enough to be 17 again, making love

           on the beach with a girl who would forget me

by autumn, a girl who could kiss the kiss of a paper bird,

           and the trawlers offshore flashing their spotlights

into the fog beyond the one-mile marker, the slight gleam

           of mackerel in their nets enough to make us grab the blanket

to cover up our bodies bright against the rising tide:

           the crumbled outline of a refugee's boat:

all four of our lungs breathing in as much as we can.

To remember which of my father's lungs was given

           to the man in Sweden who has almost lost his body,

the retinas sent by helicopter to Ohio for the child

who will grow with pieces of my father in her.

Before we leave the body, the fog will cover us.

           We will bathe in its memory, facedown in the memory

of our beginning, our end, and every child in Ohio I meet

           from now on will be named Father

and I will see myself in them and I will love them,

           their dirty faces, their thin bodies warm and feathered,

fluttering in the breeze above the world while my father,

empty, unknowing, keeps on giving himself away.