Welding

And if all the beasts in Christendom turned in one breath to desert me,
and the scavengers plucked the last thread of flesh from my fingers and hopped,
reeled drunkenly to finer debaucheries, and if the grass withered
and the earth opened and even the approbation of the sun was no longer mine,
gravel and red clay and fine silica mists,
if every trace of my granular ramblings and crystalline showers of doubt
sifted through the sieve of our hot-breathed children’s memories
and leached down through the bedrock of family legend
and crumbled away forever,

would you go?

A tiny bird's leg we found
guarded by an old woman
the jackal's gnaw of time
gouged her face, though youth
had returned and rutted there,
insatiable, pawing its hooves
in her rapturous smile.

"Look," she said, full of portents:
this horn of claw
this length of bone
this scabrous hardness of flesh
all foretold our wealth and potent minglings.

I laughed, but not you.
Not you.
You squatted in the dirt.
"But how, mother," you begged.
"How will I find her,"
fierce flashings in the breast,
"after?"

After the mud-raked hills and the gasping of the fish
After the berries' juices have drained
And the aluminum flesh peeled back,
the soul still dripping.
After the cymbals' deafening crash
announces the end, I will know you.

Stripped of your power,
fluid,
blind,
destitute,
with no hands,
with no voice,
rubbed free of pretense
I will know you.

And all the chafing of my palms,
your jackhammer shout,
the thin tremolo sawing of my tears;
all the whispers and the long draughts of silence
the scars of two souls welded and joined
all the pangs and twinges and little heartaches
of love will not have been in vain.