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The Flesh Is Allowed Its Disasters
The flesh is allowed its disasters as is an olive tree, broken
Or storm-split or savagely pruned, upon some goat-browsed,
Goat-ruined hill. Not twisted nor in particular
Gnarled, the sweet flesh is warped precisely
Into a sour, tough meat which, when despair and age have
Parched the sustenant soil past freshening, life must feed on,
Choking itself with itself in one last carnal
And cataclysmic gorge, until the Bone Man
Comes grinning with the bill.
Not so, not so
With the mind, a nearly fluid
Core for a calcified globe, vibrating to motionless
Winds, as subtle as Time is, a pulse of the Pulse; and surely
Safe in its private high pharos, above any inundation
By gale-crazed water. But no! successive typhoons
Wail, a weak wall gives, stones crack, and a burst tower,
Wave-shattered, plunges as gray gobbets down
To the abyssal Mud. Then, where a coast was,
Green-shored and succulent, spreads and fouls the clouds
A slime-mold Dead Sea, squirming.
When a frail
Flower is bruised it droops,
An unimportant Silence, into death; but
When a star dies it goes like a piece of God,
Though it may redden in some ill-hewn old
Ell of the House, unseen. Were the star dismayed
To mark the flower's quick death, were the living flower
Touched by the star's immeasurable dying,
Then would the mild leaf mourn for the swollen mass, or
A tear confound one band in a faded spectrum?
I would have it
So. In exhausted loam, somewhere
Between a broken flower and a tenuous star,
Loving them both but responsible for neither,
Isend my thin roots through a hillside's windward
Slope. They are thirsty. They want food. And, taught to expect
No sadness from a star, no flower's pity
They dumbly wait for the awesome
Feast or the engulfing
Maw: for Whatever.
These sultry noons, only a fragment of me
Is free of earth. I too wait, meanwhile crushing
No flower, imploding
No star. My roots strain, touch, probe. They reach out
For green fields from that weakened trunk, my dull
Disastrous flesh. As a desert in me demands
The final onrush of Ocean, so an inner cold spring urges
Fire, heat ash, death, Zero. Both are desperate
To immolate this my flesh
Of the allowed disasters, of too many
Allowed disasters. Well, of the pair, one someday
Will see me thus or thus eradicated
Between a dark, dead star
And-Ah, there where I was!-a resurgent flower.