Can’t Live Without

by Jonathan Farmer

Liver, lungs, heart;
blood and water,
skin. You need
enough warmth not to freeze
in winter and the air
has to be breathable,
the water clean enough to drink-
but only that; the merely bad
can give more life for years.
A modest amount of safety;
failing that, a little bit of luck
or a decision to accept
humiliation, to accept injustice,
knowing nothing you can do will make it stop.
And sometimes, nothing does
and no one is safe and the grief
can cripple anyone who still has
strength enough to grieve,
sufficient calories, a mind
not yet deranged
by suffering beyond the terms
evolution has prepared the mind to hold across
millennia in which
time and again starvation ruled,
disease, the bodies piled up, entire groups
were massacred, the human population dwindled
in one place or another, all across the earth.
As far as I can tell, no trace of it exists.
The long genetic conversation in
its twining and untwining, turning into thought,
has left no record-none, at least,
that’s likely to do good.
We grow fat hoarding
calories and hungering for more.
I go out running in the morning just
to burn some off and make room for another meal.
The next day, more of me,
more manufacture, vast assemblies
under bone and sinew, intricate
even at the vulnerable point of fact,
flesh, even at the irreducible,
skeleton, calcium-
in the mounds they find
human bones as dry as chalk,
pocked and brittle, nicked or broken,
stripped clean: even there-
that once were teeming with instructions,
growth and governance, with life of which
somehow came this consciousness that does not think
I am this congregation, matter built
according to a code.  That does not think
division, and does not think of need
when it says need.  What do I want of me,
of all this blossoming, relentless
continuity, dwindling, coherence,
categories-this cell muscle, this cell bone,
this femur, this one liver,
this one heart?  O obligated, consciousness
that takes its bearing from its times:
when after too long at the office I suspect
I have it wrong, where does that come from if
I can’t conceive what being right would mean?

Most evenings I come home to happiness,
the orange light opulent among
the overlapping leaves,
belonging, to a sense
of health inside a healthy world.
Life allows for this.
The confluence of technology and capital,
nations, wars and systems, governing ideals
(and failures), death and suffering, decisions,
mine included, has resulted in a world
where I can come home happy to a person
whom I love, with whom I live in comfort and,
more often than I once thought possible,
in joy. And yet the sense of wrongness
never quite dissolves, the hunger
for life the hunger
to justify my life. It yields
no grand solutions,
nothing sweeping to resolve
a world in which I’ll say
that I can’t live without
my morning coffee, writing, time to read,
my love, dear heart: my wife.
Nothing but awareness, working toward
a life of actions that accounts-more often and,
over time, more reflexively-for the fact,
itself a marvel, of what we are and what we have.
Give more away.  Get more from what we keep.
Admit to my desires.  Look to them for images
of that strange constellation under which
a single and impermanent identity appears.
Look less for purposes.  Give less credence
to the sense that any ultimate objective,
any overriding meaning, might exist.
Seek happiness when happiness is possible
but don’t mistake it for a message, don’t
take happiness for granted-it’s all so plain.
Give more away.  Give more and more away.

*Photo courtesy TF28.