If There Are Only Minds, Who Will Breathe For Us?

Dateline: 9/2/97

Plane banking high to the north
Beneath a streaming population of clouds
Migrating eastward, while I stand
Planet spinning under my feet--
Everything moving--a sudden rush
Of starlings splashed up from street
In the wake of a passing truck--
Then air settles to its live, quiet hum.

My heart beats here, and while
I am reminded by this web of clouds,
Sky, earth and travellers strung between
Of the world-netting virtual loom
Into which I thread my thoughts
The great sparking collaboration
Of nerve cells and chip memories,
Packets, speeding bytes, airborne poems--

I know these splashed-up poems
Must fall to ground and draw me there
To one particular earthly place
One singular moment where I am
A singular person, where my heart
Beats without stutter, my hopes and disabilities
Cloud around this minute pulled from years--
The poem is in the body, see?

Words woven into fingerprint lines
Encoded gene strands that can carry
This one, this only time, place, person
Wrapped in a talisman, a bottle in the sea--
My voice whispering in your ears
My poem listening for your heartbeat
Where I am this one living creature, here
I put out my hand and touch you, there.

--Margery Snyder

"If There Are Only Minds, Who Will Breathe For Us?" was prompted by the MCI Internet ads which promise "no race, no age, no disabilities. . . only minds" in cyberspace, & by my disquiet in realizing that this welcome leveling effect of the Net as a communications medium is also a form of DISembodiment, somehow anti-poetic. That is why I am happy to see the technology evolving towards fuller embodiment of poetry on the Net, as in the many audio sites where you can hear poems spoken in the poet's own voices, almost feel their breath on your ears.

For my partner-guide Bob Holman's answer to this poem, read "What You Can't Understand Is Poetry Is Connected to the Body Again."

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