Symmetry

It makes sense

that ginger grows underground

that it is brown with eyes and many bulbous noses and thumbs and big toes,

but no fingers

that at any point in time it is uprooted,

displayed at a green grocer's,

where it is scratched and sniffed, palmed over,

snapped

this probably hurts

wrapped up in a small brown bag

the crispness of which foreshadows the zest the rhizome will bring to a meal or dressing

to be brought home

peeled by the tender mastery of a spoon and the opposable digit--trying in each half-moon journey to the knuckle of the index finger to re assimilate with his four peers who, thanks to the cruel hand of evolution, shun his exotic looks and foreign function.

much like the root itself, a thumb owes its very shape to what has come to be over an accumulated number of eons...whatever an eon may be: 10000 REM cycles, or generations of drosophilia melanogaster in your opinion--

then scraped

till its flesh separates

fibrous elements discarded

the marrow sampled by the union of finger tip and tongue

then swept into a dish of something larger

itself composed of the best parts--freely given, torn out of, ripped or cut away from-- of many many other different bodies, sources, bulbs, and buds

the only remaining trace of prior incarnations of the root

well voiced

by the mute testament to being

perceived by the tongue,

the lingus

the lingus bears the burden of testament

some might add that a ledger of a journey could be found moreover in the bowel

but I am no scientist

and I would add

that shit

carries the herb's narrative around once to the earth

which we all know is the end, but also once again the beginning

this on one hand obscures the sequence of events

what is the cause? the effect?

what the catalyst? the result?

yet notice that such circularity gives life an evenness, a well distributed weight--so that we can feel its presence--a perfection

of symmetry

I am pleased to be a composite of what has come before. I am tickled to know that discerning the traces of my past will be a nearly impossible task to undertake forensically; years from now anthropologists will fail to read lingering muscle fragments of my petrified heart so as to publish on how it was broken and mended and broken and mended again. I prefer the science of fiction to document that which I have consumed, that which I have known.
I like to trace the bridge of my nose
to know that it has been molded like my father's and his mother but with the delicacy of my own mother's
I like to feel the obtuse breadth of my hips--it is nice that some-part of me is slow
and the cheeky 'pop' of my rump
which come from my paternal grandmother and grandfather respectively
I won't chart for you the antecedents to my facility for tears or even my penchant to ENTRENCH in a person or thing
it would be trite to give simplified coordinates for such stuff, just for the sake of poetics
when it fact such a task is like trying to sort out where the seas begin and end
can a cartographer chart such lines?
This does not necessarily hold true for lovers
which is why perhaps so many people write on the subject
once an inamorato has been dislodged from your heart, there persists a vision of dual temporality--the ability to critique what you once were, and what remains
what remains being an acknowledgement of what part of the other lingers, and what part of the other has dissipated
like taking measurements on the half life of radioactive elements

trumping such moments of lucidity of course
is the comic inability to transcribe what else you might be around or apart from this nuclear enclave of your heart

yet no mind
the lingus bears the burden of testament
to the perfection of symmetry :

I was cooking a soup
preparing for nightly ritual of 'taking in'
when I started thinking about the two men I've really loved

One taught me how to be mean
I mean really vicious
which, he also taught me,
is necessary for when you must battle
life takes teeth and claws
and sometimes and with some people
"things must be destroyed before they can begin again"...

...Star Wars also taught me that...along with the entire western cannon of mythology...and Joseph fucking Campbell...

but one taught me first, and for myself

One taught me how to be vain about my linguistic and intellectual capabilities
which I appreciate
because after all
hubris
is what separates gods from men

From another I learned to make salad dressings
really good salad dressings
with lime and ginger and peanut butter

and how also to open an avocado

to LIKE avocado

and Indian food

and the outdoors

as well as the idea of living someplace without the ocean

in favor of mountains

and that I could want to becoming something other than what I came into the world as

this other also trained me to find Orion in the sky

and instructed that beech trees will always grow in stands...

from the other I learned to yield...

Sometimes

just knowing all these things

and knowing these men exist

makes me so happy I think space will swallow me whole

I imagine that as symmetry circumscribes itself
it approaches infinite density
as if complete happiness were a black hole
and death were simply the completion of the arc

so that--after I lifetime of cycling through love--

once truly content

no trace of life can escape

despite one's best efforts to the contrary

and as one comes closer and closer to the 360th degree of the arc

one must fight harder to evade happiness

and continue to live...

these thoughts

are probably why seeing old people alone

makes my heart crumple in my throat

because I sense that they are very happy about living

but also very tired (perhaps) from a lifetime of good things

perhaps so tired

that they no longer wag their tongues and map their stories

I fret

I fret

I cry

about who is working to transcribe these lives?

Who?

...I know

that like concentric ripples in a pool pf water

emanating from what appears at least to be an infinite source

symmetry is perpetual/

simultaneously ending and beginning

but nothing in between

which is why it has no narrative

and why I should not try to counterfeit it with inadequate words...

but I am still young

and I have not yet found man to teach me to surrender