Wednesday's Poem
Wind Song
Some live like the body keeps the score. Many more live
like the Goddy keeps the score, the Deity daily tallying our
screw-ups, careless words, lusts. Old Goddy Claus—making
his list, naughty and nice and all that. (You’ve never heard
the word Goddy because I just made it up to rhyme with
body, and appear clever. Yay, point for me).
I know for a fact the body keeps the scar. So does Goddy’s.
Or at least that’s the hint the Old Book gives: “he showed them
his hands and his feet” (that’s late-Luke/John-post-resurrection
chatter—“reach your finger here.” Yay, point for him).
Scores. Scars. Potato. Bougainvillea. Oh let’s call the whole
thing off, sing a hymn and go out out out into the fraily day
collecting scars and rumors of scars. I’ve heard some say
that which does not kill us makes us stranger, stranger like
the odd God who didn’t major in accounting but humanities.
His wind sings: “Life is a river, not a ladder.”
Oh, this reminds me of the end of S3 of Shrinking. Harrison Ford's character is trying to shake Jason Segel's character out of his fear of finding love after the death of his spouse. Tells him, “Good. What a shame to be 42 years of age and not be completely covered in scars. They are the evidence of a life fully lived.”
Gimme the scars.
oh I love this so much! And Goddy, so good: reminds me of Auden's lines in "Whitsunday in Kirchstetten" -- "Rejoice, the bells / cry to me. Blake's Old Nobodaddy / in his astronomic telescopic heaven, / the Big White Christian upstairs, is dead / and won't come hazing us no more, nor bless our bombs"