Borrowed Atoms

June 21 2011

As if you could move through the world

incognito.

But the body

reveals itself.

Its boundaries

aren’t as hard as you thought.

Traces of skin, a fingerprint

glistening

in ultraviolet light.

The rumbling in your gut

no matter what

you ate.

Borborygmi, eructation

flatus,

where bacteria

outnumber all the cells

you’re made of.

And the hot wet breath

you can’t help express

so many times a minute.

Even saliva, aerosolized,

inadvertently left

behind.

Molecules

drifting off, wafting up,

carrying your scent

your sickness

your inner life,

your idiosyncratic signature.

The chemistry

of pheromones

and antigenic fitness.

So your body’s slowly bleeding off

into the surroundings,

exposed by the skin

you still insist

encloses you.

You are a raw neuron

immersed

in life’s primordial soup,

cringing, retracting, firing up

at the slightest touch.

At a flutter of wings

you never imagined

mattered.

There is even a hollow tube

that runs right through

from your nose

to the seat of darkness,

turning you inside out

into the world at large.

Confusing

where things end

and start.

No in and out

no right and left,

no us, and them. 

You return to the earth

from which you came.

And your borrowed atoms

the stuff of stars,

eventually reclaimed.

I think we live with this unexamined conceit that the environment is out there, while we are contained in here. But, in a very literal sense, our bodies are in this constant intimate exchange with our surroundings. We can’t seal ourselves off from pollution, from the water in which we swim. And, if you do the numbers, you’ll realize that we are repeatedly breathing in the same molecules as those exhaled by Napoleon and Joan of Arc. The "flutter of wings" are those of that notorious butterfly of chaos theory:   a theory which is meant to illustrate the non-linearity of cause and effect; but also gets at this same idea of interdependence through time and space.

In  a larger sense, we are all stardust:  where all our atoms were born, and will eventually return. Of course, this isn’t an argument for immortality. Because our singularity, our consciousness, does die. Which makes us all the more miraculous:  thrown together in this extraordinary transient reprieve from entropy.

This is one of the few poems in which I dig in just a little to my medical background. And also one in which I take the great risk of actually appealing to a modicum of scientific literacy.

(There is the brief reference to pheromones, for example.  This is based on the fact that we are able to unconsciously sense our partner’s immunological status (based on the HLA antigen, or so-called major histocompatibility complex), which has been shown to be a basis for romantic/sexual attraction. In this case, it’s the attraction of opposites:  which makes sense, if you think about “hybrid vigour,” about immunological fitness. Another example is our gut. Anatomically speaking, it actually defines a potential space that is outside our body:  a long donut hole that runs right through us. I’m not sure what to make of “seat of darkness”, except as a backhanded homage to Conrad – who sensibly selected a much more heroic bit of anatomy! )

On the other hand, medical jargon throws up such great words – like “borborygmi”, and “pheromones.” So how could I let such lexicographical gold go to waste?!!