I am not a fragment

I am not a fragment, even if I must disguise the way my body parts complete me.  Lack of fashion is my faith, a cob of corn sunning on my window sill.  Paint it a smooth yellow shade.  You have dressed the truth with truth. 

I will not become a fragment  
                 open prayer   
        alludes to  
                    the sun's withdrawal,  
the ship-shape's ache,                           the flicker's rabbit tail of proof,  
                    dart, curse, center, 
nurse your heart out,                            electrically, 
                                                    peet-peet, peet-a-weet
Fooled ya.  Tick. 
                 Wren, a sphere of wholeness, wriggling out,
                                                   plunging for the difficult,
                                                   filling up.                       

In Tibetan throw means offer: the tardy guru throws his nose-ring to the twilight; none follow those thickly-padded feet, his offering tossed beside one banana peel gone black and blasphemous, posing as a sleeping winter leaf.  A guru, maneuvering as a fragment: unsavory, hesitant,                                                              
        cheatgrass equated with a criminal

funeral and rain,                       a judgment clean and kept,                     the righteous salt,

                        Awareness: the half-dead stone we walk around.

Like I said.  Not a fragment. But once I was a teacher. 
Every year the bearded man would come
with black-eyed boxes full with raptors. 
Once he pulled me to the side, confessed he craved the gasp
the children made when he opened one black panel at a time,
the small mouths so round and clean,
the freshness of the sound, the rapture of it all. 
This is what wholeness is, he said. 
Every year he'd call me up before the crowd of 8-year-olds
and let the hawk perch on my arm. 
That hawk had a beginning and an end. 
There was a shape rising from my arm,
and it didn't share my blood,
only a reminder of a tattered cloak. 
The children broke into applause.  I bowed
as a symbol that we live.  This is what a sentence is:
a hawk with specific eyes perched upon a line of truth
and peering out, then put away into a box,
a strange beast brought out to mark the young,
and then to fail most of the time. 

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