This Connection of Everyone with Lungs Read Free Page A

cells is ourselves and everyone else.
    Going back ten generations we have nine thousand ancestors and going back twenty-five we get thirty million.
    All of us shaped by all of us and then other things as well, other things such as the flora and the fauna and all the other things as well.
    When I speak of yours thighs and their long muscles of smoothness, I speak of yours cells and I speak of the British Embassy being closed in Kenya and the US urging more aggressive Iraq inspections and the bushfire that is destroying homes in Sydney.
    And I speak of at least one dead after rioting in Dili and the arrest of Mukhlas, and Sharon’s offer of 40 percent of the West Bank and the mixed results of Venezuela’s oil strike and the overtures that Khatami is making to the US.
    When I speak of the curve of yours cheeks, their soft down, their cell after cell, their smoothness, their even color, I speak of the
    NASA launch and the child Net safety law and the Native Linux pSeries Server.
    When I speak of our time together, I speak also of the new theories of the development of the cell from iron sulfide, formed at the bottom of the oceans.
    I speak of the weight of the alien planet.
    And I speak of the benefits of swaddling sleeping babies.
    Beloveds, all our theories and generations came together today in order to find the optimum way of lacing shoes. The bow tie pattern is the most efficient.
    I want to tie everything up when I speak of yous.
    I want to tie it all up and tie up the world in an attempt to understand the swirls of patterns.
    But there is no efficient way.
    The news refreshes every few minutes on the computer screen and on the television screen. The stories move from front to back and then off the page and then perhaps forward again in a motion that I can’t predict but I suspect is not telling the necessary truths.
    I can’t predict our time together either. Or why we like each other like we do.
    I have no idea when our bodies will feel very good to one of us or to all of us together or to none of us.
    The drive to press against one another that is there at moments and then gone at others.
    The drive to press up against others in the same way.
     
    December 8, 2002
     
    Beloveds, those astronauts on the space station began their trip home a few days ago and sent ahead of them images of the earth from space.
    In space, the earth is a firm circle of atmosphere and the ocean and the land exist in equilibrium. The forces of nature are in the blue and the white and the green.
    All is quiet.
    All the machinery, all the art is in the quiet.
    Something in me jumps when I see these images, jumps toward comfort and my mind settles.
    This, I think, is one of the most powerful images in our time of powers.
    Perhaps it isn’t lovers in our beds that matter, perhaps it is the earth.
    Not the specific in our bed at night but the globe in our mind, a globe that we didn’t see really until the twentieth century, with all its technologies and variations on the mirror.
    Beloveds, when we first moved to this island in the middle of the Pacific I took comfort from a postcard of the islands seen from space that I bought in a store in Waikk. There was no detail of the buildings of Waikkin the islands seen from space. No signs of the brackish Ala Wai that surrounds Waikk. Everything looked pristine and sparkled from space. All the machinery, all the art was in the pristine sparkle of the ocean and its kindness to land. The ocean was calm.
    Beloveds, this poem is an attempt to speak with the calmness of the world seen from space and to forget the details.
    This is an attempt to speak of clouds that appear in endless and beautiful patterns on the surface of the earth and that we see from beneath, out the window from our bed as we lie there in the morning enjoying the touch of each other’s bodies.
    This is an attempt to speak in praise of the firm touch of yours hands on my breast at night and its comfort to me.
    An attempt to celebrate the