Paul, in Corinth, separating flesh from flesh,
one kind of men — by which he means of women —
one kind of beasts, another of the fishes,
and another of the birds. And bodies celestial
as well as terrestrial, different glories,
the glory of the sun and the glory of the moon,
each visible star a glory, each invisible star
about to be. Then he asks, beyond the body,
how the body can be raised, yours and mine,
except the other flesh — animal, grain, and stone —
be changed. He means, he says, the spiritual body,
as different from the natural as earth from air,
as air is different from yet part of gravity.
As if, say, we'd fallen from a horse on a road
somewhere between here and Damascus because
a kind of light out of nowhere was blinding
and the height of the fall was the weight
of our whole life up till now — how to be lifted,
how to be made to see again but different —











From Poetry Northwest, Spring 2006. Copyright University of Washington. Used with permission.