My father is falling or thinking he is. He cannot be sure. My sister is being lifted from her bed in a swing, like a piece of luggage, she says. My daughter is vomiting . My daughter is weeping in deep, heaving sobs. This is the body’s knowledge. This is why we distill, we purify, we cleanse, we condense. We go through this difficult birth of ourselves to get down to the essentials, the last three true things.

This is what the body knows. It knows what the earth knows. It knows the pulse of life, the heat of life. The heat and pulse of time and pain and sorrow and human movement across the face of the universe. This is what the body knows that they don’t know how to tell us. The body knows the movement of time, the collection of things in the course of a life. The build up of mold, the gathering of spider webs in corners, a high stack of papers, clumps of trash in wire fences, the last smashed weeds in an empty lot.