your body re-generates every few years,
they say:
your face, your body –
they stretch and turn inward,
your soul gets nicks and bruises,
your inner eye gets sharper

your skin becomes treebark,
your spine becomes tangled,
your faith gets tempered, as if in some
preparation

the whole existential zeitgeist
is this short-lived-es-ness

you map your life on a horizon, as if
you were a god, you witness your
babyhood to the now, you are
this heroic (or tragic) "figure"
(vestiges of the mind's aetheria)
you feel your way in white-blindness,
gasping in passionate exaltations, as
if your answers truly mattered

II.
my skeleton is responsive, like a
marionette. i feel an intent to move, and,
god willing, i move.
like a dancer on a concrete stage,
i move, or rotate, gesticulate, rest

i ambulate through recurring motifs
in recurring surroundings,
the seasons change
a mountain collapses
the sky continually repaints itself

III.
we push our bones together and
create these temporal super-structures, animate
and animal: we claw and bite and howl,
and, sixteen generations later, we are
the most minor footnote never to be read,
except in far-flung poems

IV.
the roots smash our cages,
and our bones ossify, the roots,
they shrivel and ossify,
the world itself ossifies

it is at this point knowledge ends
and the true poem begins.