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in plain air 153
Vitality, foul places
And presences that we two
Innocents visited, with
A sighting one night (eyes closed)
Of death's door, going past it
In the hospital basement:
Bare concrete, tall, wide, unmarked,
Set fl ush in the concrete wall.
The stunned spirit monitors
The shocked and wounded body
And itself; and puzzles how
The mind includes the body
The body includes the mind
Equally.
-- I remember
Using the body the way
One drove a car when a kid:
To see what it could take, from
A curiosity quite
Disinterested, from anger
At a world so impassive
And clearly uninterested
In the spiritual (no
We would not have used that word),
Authority of energies
Our own yet not our own; and
From exuberance.... When young
We are I think but distantly
Attached to our bodies, being
Ill-informed still on any
Necessity we live by.