Claim Everything

I’ve come to claim everything
is beautiful and if you wake to this
in the morning, as if someone has turned
the knob or allowed your retina to receive
more light, just a small millimeter
so that all the world is brighter somehow,
it seems, this could be the definition
of joy. Nothing has changed;
paint falls away from the yellow door,
weeds grow between the uneven slabs
of concrete and it breaks open
the place within which once believed
in goodness or the clean face of god.

Because you’re dying I forgive you
the finger on the nurse’s wrist
which follows her veins upstream;
away from the cancer, eating your liver.
Because you also forgive death
by skimming the pulse of the living, searching
for what you do not have. I understand now
more of what it means to be human. How the body continues
to desire---and I want it to stay, this animal
called hunger, for it means
we are both still alive.