The Nit

Shame made you hide this fecundity,
Dead white, until pinning you,
Parting the loved locks of your childish scalp,
I found life swarming over you.
Sometimes revulsion is ineluctable
As physical law, and pushes you back.

Later, I try to explain my reaction:
Houses hold roaches and mice,
In the immaculate dress of a hummingbird
Mites pass tiny lives from probing bill
To cardinal flower.

Flukes await frogs, voles eat frogs,
And the heron, standing one-legged
In its own reflection,
Eats vole. In all the fluke
Lives, breeds, needing each to survive.
Whether design or profligate coincidence,
Every moment is marked with this
Infestation of birth as well as death.

Our human spans sometimes blind us;
So it was after your minute birth
That I could look upon you,
Seeing only birth, and life.
I distanced myself from the truth
Hidden in your hair,
And must now love you as you are,
Not wholly of me, not mine,
Possessing the full circle unbroken.
Beauty is not always truth;
And, for that, love is ever richer.

Jeff Crooke
6-20-99