The glorified body.

I.

"Though I'm old and sick," said Uncle Ned, postincision, half his stomach gone, "in God's eye, I'm just a baby." He looks forward to his new body, his second coming together--successful, not like this dying from the inside out, ending in the rotten sweet smell of cancer, antimatter on the tibia, fibula, the lovely long bones' sockets cradle short bones and become just tent poles for the trying flesh: it multiplies beyond itself, beyond the adult's blue temples, open-boned skull of the baby, scalp drawn tight like a drum, s pulse beating; the liquid eye, held by membrane, so thin.

An old man's death is far below frontiers--where pain is peaked so high it might reverse, as nerves are numbed, then sing: the newborn's head pressing on

the pelvic bone, then out! "A bloody show," they said, and then

"it's crowning!" There's something to show for childbirth, but what of this straining of the body out

beyond the body? Only an observer could think of pain as a tunnel.

Does a tumor flower? Can the dying learn to love their death?

II.

The curve of cheek into jaw, eyes gravely set among small orbital bones--all reassemble that last day we hope. Will our souls, like yeast, fall on dough to multiply, a ferment, and this time--no kneading, no bearing down? Put a finger in the dough, it leaves a mark, but the rising fills it in.

When we rise, will our fingers from past lives leave shining prints, or will the new body erase memory: all our flesh-fine meetings? Here we meet, our skin on skin, but then--in

the glorified body will we penetrate or linger in the crossing of colored lights: never dark or lonely

in that white light where colors leech and edges too--we lose ourselves in God, become one body.

It's enough to make you sick of ecstasy, nostalgic for the birth-marked body which must be fed.

III.

"Have you anything here to eat?" Jesus came from death to ask for breakfast. The disciples, mouths gaping, followed his every bite--broiled fish and raw honey. "Feel me and see--a spirit doesn't have flesh and bones like mine!"

What sort of body is this! Not a ventriloquist's dummy for the soul, oh no--his body is his voice, music every cell, but his hands are as solid as the bread with its honeycombed holes.

He is impossible, he is a wave, a particle, his hands feed the fire, turn the fish. He hurtles through space while he is still here with us. We're slow.

We used to think if we knew where we were we'd never know for sure how fast we're going.

Even the glorified body is not what we think.