Death Becomes Us

Death Becomes Us

8/8/2001

An Odd Thought That I Entertained While Driving to Work 

Along the Peaceful Highway

I feel beneath my whirling wheels

the stuff of righteous dinosaurs.

A trillion strong, and laced with diatoms;

They waded into bogs and pitch

lip to hip, thick on thick:

Sun burning down on a cold-blooded cake -- black crude;

Oil, that is.

There is about this place, the perfume of life

sprinkled on the Coliseum floor.

We are roses, rooted in the catacombs

We are restaurateurs, dining on a layer cake of death.

Death in my engine

Death under tire,

Death ever passing down my throat.

How can I begin to celebrate the cost --

of all this post-life, living in

or under me.

I cite 

my gasoline and street:

(fossil fuel derived)

-- I rev a Rex, or run

Eoraptors out the pipes,

Even as I steel down roads of rotted clams.

I cite the sod,

the dirt made living at the cost of trees and worms and germs

and millennia of dead stuff, folded back

into the humus of

humanity.

I cite the corn, rising on the broken cobs of yesteryear,

I cite the barns, the chicken coops and mills…This strange,

STRANGE industry of death.

I cite myself, alive at the end of the slaughter.

Some of you will say

We shouldn't do it …

No butcher blocks or Burger Kings,

Chicken soup or Jimmy-Deans for any noble soul!”

To which

I drop my jaw, finger an incisor,

and go packing with the wolves.

Come with me and part the baleen of the whale,

unmask the krilling fields, or…(If we really must)

Pull a microscope and shudder

at the carnage in a drop.

Then,

with telescope survey

the battle ground:

clashing armor

camouflage and sting,

exploding hooves-- the roar,…

the slash and

TUMULT,

tooth and fang

of this our warring planet.

(Vegan, if you will, appeal to God - but never nature

For your thoughts)

Then .. (as if to aid my troubled mind)

He cuts the lamb.

Robes my nakedness in sacrificial skin.

Cooks the fish, says “Come and dine."

Will I scorn his gifts? Or rather,

Celebrate the present

Even as I wait

the finish of this bloody dispensation.

So …. 

Let me celebrate

The dead and dying saints

Let me count the cost (in calcium)

Of this unrivaled freedom;

shadowed in the monoliths of Arlington;

I feel their blood on distant shores

Pooled like oil pools, buttressing 

the borders our somewhat civil government;

I feel the clean bright air, purified on beaches

in Normandy and Nam.

I feel my freedom, twined with Billy clubs

and those who caught the bullets, that might have been mine

I shift, and feel my ease, riding on the backs of slaves,

and freemen

Confederates and Yankees

Yanks and tanks and the seared Japanese,

Chinese building railroads for dirt wages,

And all those communal-doves

Shot down by Lenin.

I need not be assigned with the victors to win,

I find my bounty, like a castle built

On a mound of horror,

stupidity and error, bravery and love,

tragedy, and triumph,

cowardice,

and —

the willingness to let blood flow.

Speaking of horrendous:

I see the incarnate Jesus

(in the meat), riding through this funnel with us --

The corpse of God lifted high:

I see his drained and lifeless limbs,

the bruised obscenity

I see, The

Death of Life.

And Now …

I feel another heart pounding over mine,

the light of resurrection shining through my eyes.

I know that my Redeemer lives;

and I will find my life

Inside of His.

IN

And ON,

And AFTER

This grand mountain of death.

.

.