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In the dance of my cells,
and in the dance of your cells, too,
is a type of love-making:
chromosomes posture and align
for the frontal embrace that precedes
the coupling and uncoupling of parts.
The same brief frenzy reduced
by familiarity to the mere ritual
of intertwined and short-lived bliss
that perpetuates the incestuous DNA
that forces each life
along the helix
of love and life and decay.
Alone, in this body -
the living temple
of my narcissism -
I find no graven images carved
into the columns of my marrow,
instead infidels creep in,
mistakes are encoded as truths,
differences left irreconciled,
ripples disturb the reflecting pool
of my genome
and mere verisimilitude is allowed to rule.
In a thousand minor ways
errata poison the sacred texts.
Fidelity is tainted, pogroms contemplated
And in what first seems an inconsequential issue,
a few cells dissemble from the truth,
a small insurrection flares.
Heresy proceeds to mutiny
and eventually flesh devours its own,
more ravenous with each unfaithful rendering
until the body must expire
as surely as the fall
of any empire,
or bridge
or wall.
At times, it seems
we are but untidy mitotic constructs,
remorseless, well intentioned,
but without true compass
and drifting awry,
like the ancestor
who palmed an edged flint
under cover of darkness,
mounted it on the compass-point of his intent
and then, in the guise of an embrace,
pierced the flesh until he breached
the artery of his father's neck.
And in doing so, did he not claim
privilege to reseed his mother's womb?
For that too, seemed an act of love -
the reconciliation of familiar parts:
the conservation of the genome -
the communion of similar flesh
justified by the sacrifice of blood.
Into such a narrow universe slouches the beast,
its hour come at last,
for what else marks the anti-Christ
but the communion of the flesh
and the deliverance of false sacrament:
"Drink of this cup - it is my blood - drink it
that you may have eternal life
and dwell in the temple of your body forever."
And thus the constraints of the body are confused
with the rituals of the soul.
1999: I lean against
the lip of the winterized fountain
and cast this poem into the lifeless bowl.
Scraping sounds of rock against granite,
grim and bitter fractal glints -
sharp glittery truths unearthed,
burnished into bright science.
Such hard and narrow truths
are resurrected in the end-times
of our millennium, to be passed stealthily
like gleaming pebbles
into our trusting children's palms -
such gifts are a form of love.
I lean against the lip
of the winterized fountain,
where, certain of death,
I cast this poem into the lifeless bowl
- where it clatters briefly -
mindful that this is where each of my children
will come to play in the springtime,
for this poem is that type of love.
Jemshed Kahn is an ophthalmologist specializing in cosmetic and laser eyelid surgery. He practices at Hunkeler Eye Centers and is clinical professor of ophthalmology at Kansas University School of Medicine. His poems and literary works have appeared in Vital Signs: The UCLA Collection of Physician's Poetry, Pharos, Wittenburg Review, and the New England Journal of Medicine.
