Birthday Poem

It is important to remember that you will die, lifting the fork with the sheep's brain lovingly speared on it to the mouth: the little piece smooth on the one side as a baby mouse pickled in wine; on the other, blood- plush and intestinal atop its bed of lentils. The lentils were once picked over for stones in the fields of India perhaps, the sun shining into tractor blades slow moving as the swimmer’s arms that pierce, then rise, then pierce again the cold water of this river outside your window called The Heart or The Breast, even, but meaning something more than this, beyond the crudeness of flesh, though what is crude about flesh anyway, watching yourself every day lose another bit of luster? It is wrong to say one kind of beauty replaces another. Isn’t it your heart along with its breast muscles that has started to weaken; solace isn’t possible for every loss, or why else should we clutch, stroke, grasp, love the little powers we once were born with? Perhaps the worst thing in the world would be to live forever. Otherwise, what would be the point of memory, without which we would have nothing to hurt or placate ourselves with later? Look. It is only getting worse from here on out. Thank God. Otherwise the sun on this filthy river could never be as boring or as poignant, the sheep’s brain trembling on the fork wouldn’t seem once stung by the tang of grass, by the call of some body distant and beloved to it still singing through the milk. The fork would be only a fork, and not the cool heft of it between your fingers, the scratch of lemon in the lentils, onions, parsley slick with blood; food that, even as you lift it to your mouth, you never thought you’d eat. And do.