Personal Space

Personal Space

(“Then Jesus said to his disciples: ‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear.’” Luke 12:22)

The lines lie just below the surface,
the matrix of creation,
the embroidery of matter and space,
the unseen provider that protects everything.

What shall I wear until I die,
what shall I eat while “why” is
the most frequent word caught in the
woven synapses of my brain?

There are holes in everything, gaps between seen
and unseen. You can travel all day from the nucleus
to the orbiting electrons. And each syllable of thought
exists a moment and lasts a lifetime.

Today I will wear shorts, it is late June in Texas.
Today I will eat chicken, left over from Sunday’s meal.

But, dearest Jesus, how I miss collecting shirts from the thrift store
and discovering espresso in an Oakland coffee house with
a free mic for poets on Fridays.

Crammed into a baby blue vw bug
we graduated through the Caldecott tunnel to
Berkeley and beyond. Personal space was never an issue
but now these few lifetimes later we are scattered like
electrons orbiting separate nuclei.

But I shall eat today. I shall wear my t-shirt and sandals today,
but, dearest Jesus, I would love to meet today
just one friend who was a friend with so little personal space
between us.