Last night I dreamed of the flute.

My girl and I were making the bed,
scrubbing the white bed skirt,
and I spoke of the flute with such love I cried
and could not stop crying. 

I am a flute, I said,
a stick of a body

with holes that make sound,
with holes that wind moves through.

I am a conduit for everything music speaks:
the conductor rules me;
I rule my instrument;
my instrument rules the bodies in the audience.

We are all ruled by sound,
and by the moon.
We eat fruit, and the fruit eats us back.

When our bodies rot,
it is the process of being eaten alive
by fungal nymphs,
our sweet and godly darlings,

twinkling on every surface
of the forest floor, and beneath it,
a whispering network.

This is what it feels like to own a body,
to worship mortality as eternity.

I have lost my body before.
I fed it to the harmful, hungry and selfish.
 I lost my body, but now I’m back,

and no huntress will ever touch me again.
My body is an instrument that only the gentlest
and most attuned may use to create sound.

This is what it feels like to own a body,
to be played wildly and without a drop of shame,
to celebrate the body’s gentleness
and its guttering turbulence,

and then to bow and die.

Oh, the drama!
Oh, the sweet theater of life!

All a beloved and ancient march toward death.