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BreathJudy Bebelaar
We were beginning to stir after Savasana,
the corpse pose, in which one lies supine:
wings of the nose, root of the tongue,
spine and forehead and limbs all soft and easy,
stray thoughts just clouds passing through,
though sometimes mine are more like bumper-cars.
But this time, for a split second, I was breathing
with the universe,
stars floating out
and rolling back in, like the tides,
the darkness of space lightening, then deepening,
galaxies sailing gracefully
toward the edge of nothing,
then returning once more to the center.
When I got home I asked my husband,
from the kitchen where I chopped onions and celery,
“Do you know if they’ve decided
whether the universe is expanding or contracting?”
He called out, “There’ve been budget cuts; it’s shrinking.”
And then I heard a woman on the radio
say we take in with each breath
some of the dust of the Gobi Desert,
the Sahara, the Serengeti Plains.
She said that we breathe in the dust of stars
and then, of course, we breathe it out again.
The earth is ever decomposing,
releasing the detritus of graves.
We inhale particles of pharaohs, emperors,
motes of slaves and concubines,
of Black Elk on his eagle bier.
But then today at coffee a friend pointed out
that we don’t seem to breathe in wisdom with the dust.
She thinks perhaps there’s been expansion
ever since the Big Bang.
Which would explain why the gaps are widening
between nations and tribes and sects and factions,
why the divorce rate rises, why families feud,
why so many appear to be eager to gallop toward Apocalypse.
Still, if I lie down in my death,
and take a deep slow breath and close my eyes,
I can see the Milky Way.
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