FOREVERLAND

Outside the Christian church, after the service for Asian Americans

a man in his 70’s in brown pants and white short-sleeved shirt

and a woman in her 60’s with a floral blouse and a linen skirt

hugged each other. They hugged and hugged and hugged.

Long after some attendees had hurried off

home to early Sunday dinner or to McDonald’s,

they stood there, arms wrapped around each other’s backs

their humeri pressing each into the other.

They had just exited from the church’s eaves,

as if from the ribs of a large boat from heaven

that had perhaps also bore them upon an ocean,

a voyage from China to the new continent.

hearts can reach that far through arms.

Neither was young. And with their heads bent down,

nestled into their shoulders and necks,

we couldn’t see their faces, nor the fronts of their bodies,

only their backs and those encircling arms.

Those humeri arising from the shoulder blade,

the ball and socket speaking in a language of completeness

and freedom - movement through the union of opposites.

Their shoulders were free to move – but now he and she were wrapped in stillness,

a stillness we all could feel like wings of embracing herons,

each disappearing into the oneness of four still wings.

Or in China they would be seen as one large flame,

an illustration of the fire element coursing through the arms:

the heart meridian, the inner sea of fire,

pericardium, the “heart protector”, now opened wide,

triple warmer, three depths of love through pelvis, belly and chest,

the small intestine meridian leading to a point called “Heavenly Ancestor.”

She and he shared ancestors in the fires of stars.

They leaned back, faces shining, still hugging,

yet now each reflecting the light of the other in their faces.

In their hug we could feel the vast generations of upper arms,

humeri assuring the embrace until new life became possible for all

on a new continent formed by a love that we lived in then.

Joints connected the countries of history.

They had come full circle and stopped: we were all their children.

They invented a new kind of time. There we were, all the begats of the Bible,

living in the world we wanted, through a hug in the promised land.