BODY OF SPIRIT

I stumble sleepily into wholeheartedness
while jasmine wafts its sultry perfume
on wings of delicate sparrows
and garbage trucks smash their wantonness
through back alleys of the snoozing city
at six am like buffalo on a rampage
or adolescent grizzlies foraging the local dump
for discarded food, or better yet, tourist flesh—
the final photo on the Kodak roll a white
man’s severed hand protruding from the greedy bear’s
oral cavity, crimson fluid drips like melted candle wax
across dense coarse fur of chin and chest.

Oh body, old paint, my amigo my dear dear sojourner
on this gypsy path, can we caravan tonight under a black moon’s
tent with smiling friends and waves of soft music
to lift and tremble us whole again?

Raucous productive truck, fragrant penetrating flower, base
grizzly hunger, wild buffalo power, communal gypsy quest,
the seeds under the flower beds and weeds
under the words---
these comprise a world of continents afloat in sweet sea water
linked by tectonic plates of language patter
and earth’s sinuous curves, hallucinating,
insinuating us towards our Ithacas,
our dimly remembered islands of courage.


Something shifts in my cool bed,
a ship entering shallow harbor,
perhaps?
Feet step gratefully, one by one,
onto attained shore.
Night air now truly tasted,
spinning wind simply savored,
intertwined elements of sky of clan of ground
of true home welcomed and loved
in the chested silent center
of my being.
Transcendence incarnate
again.