A four-poem addendum to my last blog

 

This is a four-poem addendum to my last blog, in which I commented on a wonderful passage from a wonderful book. In it, President Lincoln confronts mortality in a very graphic manner, attains wisdom, and moves on. Something I hope we’re all doing or, if you’re one of the lucky and industrious few,  have done.

The scene, excerpted from George Saunders’s novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, begins with the image of the dead body of Lincoln’s beloved son, draped across the president’s lap, reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Pieta. At the end, he realizes that nothing is going to bring his beloved son back to life. He must realize that what remains of his son is not his son, but…meat. This horrible conclusion, namely that we are not immortal, not immortal at all, and that a deceased person’s corpse is as much that being who once was alive as is hair or pared nails. Meat which decays. Meat.

This image affected me deeply and was the springboard of the following four poems.

1. Meat

I’m meat, as yet unrotting flesh,

Cells safe from floods in Bangladesh

Only because they live in a different mess,

About as far from Dacca as difficulty can get.

 

What will be left? Bones and ash,

Not-I  shall rest unprotected though

Gratitude while the fever lasts

Is endearing in what might as well be

 

Pork. Fellowship and belief, imagine

Two holy men in an arctic toboggin;

A distant polar bear approaches;

Meat is all it sees and smells—Imagine

 

Meat sitting on a wheelchair in a forest;

Birds fly by and leave the eyes intact

Because  consciousness is breathing;

Mortality,  ubiquitous predator, be

 

Patient; in the meantime, eat somebody else.

Microbacteria, teams of teeming

Putrefactors. you’ll just have to wait;

Life’s still bloody good. Self’s more, self’s less.

 

2. The Condign Response is Silence

The second poem continues the theme of mortality,

 

If a raptor-threatened chick

Appealed to myths, it wouldn’t last

Three score and ten seconds longer.

The instinct to survive is stronger;

That’s why birds don’t give a peep

About belief in heaven. Yet Christians think

Self’s contained within God’s hands,

Despite nature’s talons.

 

Note: a friend thought I was being ‘tongue-in-cheek’ with the conclusion of this poem. Not so. Not so much criticizing Christianity, the ending exposes something that all religions must face: How to reconcile transcendent love with nature’s red-in-tooth-and-claw indifference?

3. more of the same in a different vein.

 

Whole E. Combustible,

Still got a face?  Have you exploded yet?

 

Impermanence! Brothers and Sisters,

are you enjoying what’s left?

 

Beneath the surface of a waveless pool,

Is that your imagined address?

 

“Óne doesn’t see stars until it gets dark”

Indifference is no consolation.

 

Scarebody wants to know—Really?

Existence! Endless Scarebody fears love?

 

4, This one I wrote this morning.

 

Meat beyond meat are you; who?

 

Lincoln was a remarkable steak;

Nevertheless, all meat is fungible,

Muscle and fiber, poet and miser,

Apple and lemon; intermittently

Glorious gristle and immortal worm,

Consciousness, meat with a name,

I, too, am moody and grateful;

Why must I come and go naked? Fall?

Yet with a host of metaphors, admit it,

Meat spirit, you’re heaven, you’re soil.