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.