Animal Faith

There is a world we must make

         sense of.

I am here now.

Where the bodies are.

Where they replicate

as in mathematics.

Where meat begets

infinitely more meat, made

to eat what feeds it.

Animal body, show me your

internal constitution,

feed me the bread

you’ve baked in the sun.

It is a world here.

We are the lost ones.

There is a time test.

The boundaries are invented.

A spiritual suitcase

traveling to no place

         empty but for

what you’ve placed inside.

Sense takes time

for a ride on that

         ethereal steam train.

This is your body

This is your house

your husk this

holy hummingbird

outside the windows

eyes make

this house a body

housing a second

body a second

time inside

the flesh we all take

as a place to reside

and feed ourselves

until

         the sense reveals itself

         as a made thing.

Senseless, the body

burgeons. Unseeing. Maybe

feeling. Hearing

         for sure. Sense

feeling’s lure, lamentable

                   what passes

for a life

         lived well.

They sell bodies in this place.

We shudder.

We stutter.

We make sense

         in the way of the animal other

whose body differs from yours or mine

only by its insistence on presence

         if at all.

So many things give life, even

         water.

The human house

is a composer

scoring sounds

its processes interpret

with minds sharp enough

to puncture the orifice

and yield

         a new house

         fit for living all the same.

The song the new house sings

it sings for you

         of the body

                            making sense.

Avian Delight

We don’t, she said, like

poems about

         coffee or birds

But doesn’t she know, can’t

she see                 that these

are the two great subjects?

How the coffee, even if stale,

         tastes always

axiomatic, and how the birds, one

bird or a flock, a gaggle, a murder,

         wing over variously feathered

wing, see from behind the same eyes

and sing:

         the sun and the moon

         betray each other

         at this precarious juncture

         of light and flight and flavor,

of burning one’s tongue on the first cup

Brewed with bones and beaks

crushed up in the beans

flight, like music, an upper limit

and every day I dip my beard

         in the bitter darkness

and imagine a Hell

I’m not sure if I believe in

Doesn’t she know

         that every bird is a subject

and every coffee bean seen

                   as well as seeing?

Doesn’t she hear the song

that even dead birds sing?

Like salvation and damnation mixed

in a single container, a single

         continent seen from a straightforward

sky             hard fought space

Aren’t these objects too?

Aren’t we?

Are   not

flying and not drinking

         activities we’ll take up

in the afterlife?

         or the afternoon?

Nothing to do

with coffee or birds

nothing    and doing  

       awake.

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