should i be nurse-maid to my body? should i consider every morsel that i put to my mouth? i know you feed the body good things, the body is good. you feed the body pollution, the body becomes polluted. that is not to say the body does not decline. the body's decline is good and natural. i touch the mole at my neck. is this the portal to my future? strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries from the forest floor that may have been touched by the animal body, the avocado sliced like seduction down its side, sweet clover by the fistful from the roadside. i press them all to my body. i have a small violet from over twenty years ago between the page and cellophane of an album, the poem flower from a crannied wall scrawled out beside it in fading pencil. beside that my father unerringly sips a beer on the gentle slope of a lawn never getting drunk. what did he put into his body? all course of good things, my mother's bread, (my mother) the animals he hunted through the forest, the ones he raised in the penned yard. my father put his feet into his boots, the boots the shape of his feet, and travelled the fields that he knew somewhere inside his own chest, as though his chest were made of the wheat he grew, straw man of the earth, not straw man. and where now his body? such a gentle kiss to that violet could send vibrations through it to undo its form. such a gentle kiss to my father sent vibrations through him and so i was born. and then again and he was unborn. what do we feed our bodies? he walking through the bush before the sun. he walking through the bush after the sun. he never returning from the bush. long stalks of wild misbehaved broccoli, ugly and stubborn dirty radish, mangled ears of corn. i press them to my body. hacked head of fish torn off to give to me its body; swath of blackness, head of bear dismembered to give to me its body; punctuated chicken head lopped to give to me its body; tremulous release of cow's thick skull. i press these to my body. holy and rendered by man's hand loaf of bread, holy holy ordinary kitchen counter magic. should i consider every morsel to my mouth? yes, yes, every one. is every morsel good? yes, yes, if we know its name, its place of birth. will my body be good? yes, yes, it is already good. will my body decline? yes, of course, here it goes. i touch the mole at my neck. is this the portal to my future? should i be nurse-maid to my body? no, no. be sweeper of this body, on my knees in glory temporary resident in this body, in gratitude weeper of this body. this body is the shrine, the miraculous accidental but precise multitudinous threshold to all.
