Right Understanding (poem)

Right Understanding

Listen, hearing

What’s attached to your head, make advance patrols, trailblazers

Of surrounding space

Hair networks your scalp not for nothing, let the air inform you

Whether something’s in it

Let your ears tell how much at-battle the noise is

Let the holes of your piercings convey as wind tunnels

A million molecules of displacement

Feeding their way around silver findings

Messages may lie inside balls and hoops, they may slalom

a path of creases, pores and moles

from shoulders descending arms

Messages that all the universe

All its temporality

All its materiality

Is a language, is a story

Constantly by your body spoken

Lean back, shut up

Make your indent in the sofa, let the cushion refill your space

Brace your elbows on your knees, leave this you-once-was behind

Discuss with me, truth, the nature of

Make a wave, with your shampoo scent

Mingled with that of illnesses, nascent

Parts to leave you first, now fading

Muscles’ last arcs of movement lost to you

Although you won’t know when

You will never print yourself against the air that way again

That no one has more

Understand

The greatest hurt and horror, like a neighbor, opens a door

You pass. You wave if you are wise

Not barriered, but breathing in

Eight

Right Thought

(2024, Stephanie Foster)