Wondrous Machine

With arched back and feet pointed, I have fallen/dove deep into the sapphire canyon, slid down this mossy slide, stood shivering with my rainbow of emotions behind the vapor of a tropical falls.  My breath blurred mountain air--the blue assumptions of the sky--and in my matted sweater against fear, without friction, and almost falling, with feathers streaming behind me at this speed, I descended like an angel.  I rode horses.  I climbed trees.  Tethered to a jagged line of teenage skaters by arms and hands, I was the snap at the the mercy of a whip.  I was ignition.

I am broken, now.   I am not whining.  Its just the fact, time and dis-ease have managed to make watermarks here and there.  Both progression and regression are measured like the children growing older on the first day of school.  (Remember that body?)  But now,  less limber, my creaking joints must be anointed much more frequently.   The leather stretches too much;  it is uncomfortably taut over edemic calves and thighs.  The garbled tongue sits minced in my dry mouth. Varicose highways lead nowhere.  My scrotum hangs hungrily toward earth like a parachute tangled in the trees.  My penis is that half-dead soldier.  

But all of this recorded--these little failings, these ugly toes--this instrument, this tool, this wondrous machine can still amaze me.  My body.  One legged like an exotic bird, I stand; for a minute or maybe two, I am balance.  Against gravity, against the vacuum of space, my bones are only scaffolding upon which my nerves and muscles vine.  I am still (and still will be) the mystery of strength, of force and power.  I hear music and I dance.