Heaven’s Breath
This morning the last day of the year
I am thinking about the 30 million
living things balanced on a person’s
shoulders in a precarious column 1000
meters high. Don’t ask me where
I got that fact but it’s a fact and I saw it.
You apparently don’t need to worry
about keeping it balanced. Can walk
down the street and keep it all in place.
Can sit in a chair in your living room
with the million or so skin cells you shed
each day and your home filling up with dust.
If you get up and walk down the street, it
goes with you. Like epaulets. Towering
shoulder pads. The thing you can carry
without worry. The day you get up into.
If you turn the right direction in the sunlight
that column might suddenly shine, the
shaft of particles dancing in the beam.
It is not a falling house, this strange science
but we would sincerely like someone
to let us know when the party is over.
And where does that column go when
you die? How to stuff it in a casket.
Into a hole in the ground. Into an urn.
How to set it on fire.
[after Heaven’s Breath, A Natural History of the Wind by Lyall Watson]
* * * * *
Easter Basket
Perhaps the whole idea of it is to toughen us up a bit.
If you touch us we won’t wince. No problem.
We’ve been in training for a few years.
Standing on incorrect corners waiting for some
particular ray of light to fall. For someone to show
up. Someone has to learn to take it. Consider my
brother and the Easter basket he hid from
the rest of us. So he could be the last one eating
Easter candy. Believe me the rest of us five
searched for it, but no one found it until the maggots
had set in on his chocolate bunnies, his jelly beans.
Of course we had a laugh about it and he had to
take it. He took it. Always the last one he was
to be licking the sweet. And now he says he’s gone.
If you’re reading this letter, he wrote, it means I’ve died.
Of what we don’t know, or how, or where he was buried
if he was buried at all. He went somewhere.
Some kind of hole in the body. Something gone missing.
It goes like that. And that last bucket of sweet, brother,
that Easter basket. All the tough and ready siblings
lined up at the door. Certain you’ve got that basket
somewhere. We’re out here sniffing for the sweet.