The body is a mystery to children. They fill in blanks with guesses, turn to adults for answers & often do not get any.

   My little kid notions of the body were romantic.  As a young man I knew what I wanted from my body: To be athletic, smart, a leader & able to appeal to the other sex.

   By college, I knew how my male body worked & little about my fascinating sexual counterparts. My body was prose. A woman's, to me, was poetry.

   Most romantics dislike body-as-machine thinking.  But at nineteen, my body literally turned against me. My doctor predicted that my auto-immune disease would destroy my body by forty. 

   Now nearly twice that age I am grateful for excellent health & his error. 

   My artist's belief in the female figure as the source of beauty remains. But age plus forty years in healthcare has demystified my romantic notions about my physical self. As age steals life's length the eternal spiritual takes center stage & the path to that through art appeals.   

   David Whyte is America's best ambassador between earth & soul. I hate that so many people, especially professional caregivers, ignore his work's (& other's) ability to heal.   

   Ironically, sister-in- law, Karen Updike, one of America's finest poets, is married to a different breed of healer. Stuart Updike, M.D. invented the famous, life-saving, Dexcom system for diabetics but ignores poetry. There is little chance you know Karen's work because even the best poets play bit parts. 

   Karen's book, Off Riding (1989 Fireweed Press), was her first. If you have ventured out alone on horse, boat or hike & wished you could find words to describe your experience here are some, presented without those crucial but scary-to-many line breaks:  

   "Gladly I live in the presence of things undone, or how could I see these fields, yellow more and more, or these hills, indigo blue? I would miss storm clouds roiling like this tangle of mane beneath my hand, the bright spurt of speed as we race toward the elm. Red baneberry would languish unseen; I would never have considered the possibilities of green."

   Poetry presides at the marriage of mortality to heaven by baptizing the soul of the body romantic. (Click below for my reading of Off Riding's 1st poem.)

KAREN'S POETRY – Off Riding #1 – from Chip

-Erie Chapman