As I look down at the jammy smile of my incision scar from my fall operation, (it is indeed in the curvaceous shape of the Amazon’s smug grin), I know I am not completely healed up as the smirk turns into a smarting pain during a long walk or just rambling through the course of my day.
But today is Fat Tuesday, and I know I’m on the brink of something. That scarry smile holds within itself a teeming matrix of healing, and bowls and bowls of those mysterious interior liquids that wash over your wounds during recovery.
I wrote this poem a few years ago on the brink of lent (on a day, much like today). And I wonder, once again,
How do I step into the bowl of this day?
The tear soup that sits salty
in dark brown pottery-
how do I lap up the poverty
of raggedness
from the day’s remnants of ripped
bread and confused wine?
Salt is soothing and healing-
the bleeding wounds suck the
white crystals unknowingly
and dry out their little souls,
but it will eventually create
a smooth ruby of a scab-
protection from infection,
a canopy of metamorphosis.
And for me, on this mardi gras bridge toward passion and contemplation, it is indeed the ongoing, stedfast hope of metamorphosis that sustains within the daily soup of life.
Shining Bridges 