Think about
all the bodies you’ve seen,
human
and otherwise.

Think beyond the human bodies
in funeral homes
or hospitals, perhaps
on battlefields or in 

car wrecks or other accidental carnage;
maybe in family homes if you grew up
in the right part of the world for folks
to die in their homes at peace or in war.

If that’s hard to grasp consider  
that you must have seen
hundreds of flies and wasps on windowsills;
chickens laid out in stores;

roadkill of all species;
the neighbor’s cat
upon a sparrow
under your feeder;

your own cat
upon a mouse
under your
kitchen table.

Have you fished?
Have you hunted?
Those are lovely shoes you are wearing —
isn’t that fine Italian leather? 

Isn’t this lovely, understanding at last
how death has surrounded you and kept you?
All life is sacred, some say.
Few of us say all death is too. It’s a shame;

we love to demonize it, saying we give
our killers the ultimate punishment
when we sentence them to the inevitable,
then sit down to a steak after the deed is done.

It’s a blessing,
this fatigue
that has come so easily 
after a day of twisting
in hard country wind.
Soon enough I hope
I’ll drop into sleep
and settle myself below
the hammering gusts
of day to day
and minute to minute,
hoping that when I rise
I’ll be rested and ready
for tomorrow’s buffeting. 

That must be my body
in that mirror, that nest
of misdirections;

here, what looks like 
a too-short
bindle of twigs;

there, something more like 
a poorly daubed
mud cluster.

Hard to apprehend the whole
when such fragments 
compel so strongly.

There in the mirror
what I think is a reflection of me
stares back piecemeal.

Then again? This is not my mirror.
My own’s covered up
behind my bedroom door. 

I don’t look at it much.
I only see mirrors in
the homes of others. 

If a mirror’s accuracy
is changed
by its provenance,

how am I changed
in relation to wherever
I happen to find myself?

At the top of the stairs
lived all my lasting errors.

I used to live there too.
Then I fled down here

and left (or thought I left)
those villains behind.

I looked up for what I thought
would be the final time

and the stairs flattened
and all my lasting errors

slid down and heaped up
around my ankles. I could not move.

Once again, there was
nowhere left to go. 

Decent heart,
improper body.
Old story. In fact
old man story:
spirit too sour,
flesh and blood too sweet.

Thanks tonight to decent bed,
to rest and random touch.
Thanks to light through
blinds laying bars across
bedspread and bodies. Almost
how it was when I was confident;

cozied up almost to arrogance;
almost tight with it,
almost no light between.
Now there’s nothing to keep 
us together. Nothing in which
to glory. Nothing to shout out. 

Of course you are cancelling
every appointment we’ve made
and now you are not speaking
in any way we like to call civil
or polite.

Meanwhile I’m
flat on my back
in a supermarket
where I’ve fallen in front of
the prepared foods and salads.

I don’t know how it happened.
No one’s trying to help me, except
for the worker who’s asking
if I need a cart for what scattered
from my arms when I hit the floor.

Of course there’s no point now
to thinking about missed jobs
and phone calls. The ceiling’s 
interesting. A bird’s flying from girder
to girder. He seems certain

of landing where he intends
to land. I’m afraid to rise as
I don’t know if on my feet will ever be
the right place for me to land

ever again. Of course no one’s
calling to offer me a place to land
that’s any safer than on my feet
so I can fall again. I might just stay here 
where having fallen is safer than waiting to fall.