To Love This Flesh

To love this flesh, its rivers and valleys, its fruits, ripe or rotting. To be conscious, to understand a toad’s agony or delight. To finger the pricks of a bush, lick the blood of the world with a warm tongue, and comprehend a crow’s hunger. To breathe the spring air full of laughing and weeping, like a sow thistle or lazy lizard. To endure without any sense of time— to wake, sleep, live and die under the same sun, moon and stars, eternal as a weed. To love the rhythm of this being, like sperm swimming upstream in one you love, never questioning or doubting the gods.