Myth of Arrival

And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul? — Walt Whitman.

I have friends who worry about the state of their souls. I understand their worry because if their souls are anything like the filthiness of their homes, their terrible physical health and their lack of a sense of humor over all this then probably whatever spiritual world they cling to isn't doing much better either. I try to tell them to go look at the koi fish but they don't seem to get it.

I have always been fascinated with koi fish, perhaps because they remind me how wonderful it is to spend a life doing what you enjoy and live without regrets … in the koi fishes' case mucking about in the water and looking at the underside of water lilies, very close up. Maybe when I die I will come back as a koi? We shall see.

My great uncle on my father's side, the mad monk Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, probably did not take the advice of the koi fish and died with regrets, too. If I had hair that greasy I know I would die with regrets. I have friends who point out that technically Rasputin, who came from Siberia, was probably not related to any Ukrainian Jews. But this is the sort of closed-minded thinking we sonnet writers are faced with and I have found it better to ignore my friends' concerns when it comes to the "murky" origins of my family. Some people will spend their energies worried about almost anything, it seems.

She bends to the river to wash her hair.
My great uncle, Rasputin, flops body
and soul to the edge of the bank. What bare
skin does not leave this ghost always hungry?
But how can the vague dead come back ready
for more worldly pleasures? It is in their
grim eyes, sensual fingers; knowing we
waste our time concerned about the welfare
of our souls when our souls are our bodies.
Pleasure is truth; it's the one divine wish
we have in this world and even then we're
fearful we shall somehow always displease.
She wrings her hair, sees my uncle, a fish
beyond hunger, flop once and disappear.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 8th, 2007 at 11:55 am and is filed under Original Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.