for Matthew Lippman
With each day the world as I’ve known it
grows more unknown
Every day I mistake some small part of it
for the whole
as if a small act of kindness stood for human nature
as if the vast awakened
underground rivers of Greenland
letting themselves like blood into the North Atlantic
said it all or
as if cultural changes in the baking of bread in Lebanon did
or the catacombs of the Medicare system I’ve now entered
did
Today the whole was summed up by a boy
so young
that it’s as if just yesterday he hadn’t yet begun
to exist
who loves to break eggs
and help make pancakes and yet
go figure
refused even so much as to taste them
And then there’s kissing
that awkward dazzling and chancy thing
which I think about more often than
I receive or give
which feels like a part
that’s no less than the whole
shebang
part and world remaking each other
Even the word world
which derives from Old English wer man
and ald — an even older Proto-Indo European word —
old or age
refers only to us and our long linguistic time
on earth
Every day I mistake and have mistaken this world
for a place
that I am inseparable from
until
with an edict or insult or a kick in the teeth
you are made to feel
no longer even the least part of it
your world made foreign
and you fleeing it a foreigner
hounded and unprotected over the face
of the earth maybe pulled from a sea
made colder by the bleeding waters of Greenland
to seek a refugee now refuge
and maybe to receive it and maybe one day
as a result
to be able to offer it to others
which like a kiss
would mean the world
*Synecdoche: a figure of speech in which a part is used for a whole