Every Body Is a Temple of Too Many Little Rooms

“The last room . . . is birdsong.”

The writer without a body

Composes quietly. Bodies

Not so writerly decompose.

How to be calm and utterly

Without fear, to remain cautious

Without concern is your concern.

Because circles are closed, you try

To approach circularity,

To lend symmetry at the close,

But bodies aren’t as circular

As our stories laid out like clothes

On beds with non-declarative

Poems, accessories posed with prose.

You’re saying there’s no symmetry?

Yes. No disembodied beauty’s

Exchanged with nothing left over.

In English there’s a helpful rhyme

Of room with womb and tomb. That’s right.

The engines of human living

And working, digging in the dirt,

Continue to surround this room

In which, dependent on engines,

You want to hear only the birds,

Independent of engines, sing.