Joseph, I Know It Is Meant to Be a Comfort, But I’m Tired of Stumbling
Where you stumble, there your treasure lies.
—Joseph Campbell
Oh body, this is your real destination,
the fall. The lurch. The blunder.
The stagger. The hobble. The trip.
Though I’ve practiced at grace
and balance, though I’ve rehearsed poise
and lifted weights and risen early to run, to ski,
you are destined to stumble, to teeter,
to drop, to collapse, to rot, and to call it good.
Though I eat kale and spirulina,
though I go to my physical every year,
though I think about taking my vitamins daily,
you are ordained to fail and somehow,
I am to find this failure favorable.
Every day I recognize you less—these wrinkles,
these curves, these aches, this gray—
and every day I treasure you more. Oh damn,
I guess that Campbell was right, then.
Here, at the altar of vulnerability, I have
fallen in love with you, the way you have
carried me through forests, up mountains,
across rivers and into ocean waves.
How you’ve lain in the blood of childbirth and joined
the miracle. You have kissed and fucked
and opened and spilled and arched and
writhed and pressed. You have leapt and swung
and spun and reached and nestled and
lunged and wept. And broken and crumpled, yes,
and stumbled over and over again. Oh what
a gift to have a body, to know it at all, to fall
and fall and fall in love with the falling,
to lose sense of where we begin and where
we are perfectly, terribly, wholly, richly, thank you, lost,
and from that grounded place
to reach out and serve the world again.
