Hummingbird Sleep: Poems, 2009-2011

Piecemeal

41 Piecemeal In the last months of his life D. H. Lawrence wrote what was later published as More Pansies, a pun on pensées, French for thoughts, as well as reverence for the sassy flower with its Gauguin-colored crowd of countenances. The future of religion lies in the mystery of touch. The mind is touchless, so is the will, so is spirit. First comes death, then pure aloneness, which is permanent, then the resurrection into touch. Touch comes back at the end to the wonder of skin that it was for the infant hand on the father’s forearm. Images of distance return: as far as a fish is from the moon, for instance. Fish feel moonpull, but they cannot touch it. Moonlight fills the tide they swim with all-over luminosity, but not touch, not the most wanted. I remember reading aloud Lawrence’s “Ship of Death” to a class in 1965, teaching my first sophomore survey. It has been forty-three years since I felt teary and noble, looked at by twenty-year-olds now in their sixties, if they are here at all. Some slid out the back, drafted on to Vietnam. What is it he urges us to build, this ship of death to carry us each into the next? What is the thing we must make? What is the vehicle of soul-travel? 42 Piecemeal the body dies, when it does not succumb to war. But Lawrence died at forty-four. He did not have to deal with much piecemeal: sight dims, muscular strength diminishes, the right hand’s grip on a stuck jar’s lid, libido, the phallus’ stance, the spine’s superb stoop to pick up something dropped. The whole dance-feel and slide of feet on ground. Numb and dumb we gradually become. Honesty about that is a glue that holds our ship together, timbers of touch, keel, rib-joist, backbone, chin, mast, ankle, shin, knee, railing, thigh. We are twelve. It is a summer evening swimming party, Sandra Martin and I. Others are nowhere apparent. By ourselves under the floating dock, treading cool lakewater, sometimes holding to a strand of the spiderweb of iron rods above us that fix together fifty-gallon drums. To say she surprises me is not enough. She delights, she illuminates, she reaches wordlessly with her tanned, satin-soft, strong thighs to hold my right thigh in her two as tongs might close around a bright coal to shift the fire’s attention in a forge. The moment she holds me with her smoothest warm pliers, 43 with her thoughtless daring, leaves me fearlessly afloat. What is it Lawrence urges us to make? Music, boatloads of music. ...