Published in Overland Issue 123 — 1991 · Poetry Body Philip Salom The body is like an ocean. It neverhears the Berlin wall is falling down, orthat Humpty Dumpty Stalin ever clambered upbut now at last lies broken.The body has no concern at allwith chess, or computers, but aches to musicwith its own infinity of drums and tideslike a prodigy resisting chaos.The body likes other bodies. Wantsto be inside them, in color-falls and depthsit never understood the first time round. Lacking words, it knows by food and sex.And movement, but not heroics overmuchthat hurt. Yet bodies sometimes run in brothelsand marathons, where tricks of pain will come,and yes the body does like drugs:some are natural and close-enoughheroics: the danger-art of cornering too fast,the abseilling metaphysic, the poetry trapeze.And not so natural drugs.But not their double*. The body is a cowardwhich is the way it might survive the death-filledbody of the world, the tribe, and the King’s men.*The doppleganger of addiction.Bodies increase, then age, theyshrink down like cellos to their strings, untilthey are unplayable, the ghost who played them left inside the memory of music.Bodies can’t pronounce death, but die.The pains they never wanted, seek their ends,want to close at last these metaphors of beingand not being. The body is not an ocean. Philip Salom More by Philip Salom › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 27 September 20244 October 2024 · Poetry Because a wind blazes Dženana Vucic Because after autumn there are / other autumns, / we learn to eat the wind. / This is what we shall do / with all our anger. 6 September 20246 September 2024 · Poetry Debts of the robots Corey Wakeling Repaying the debts of robots, / I see me in your screen fatally, which is / to say oozed certainty across a whistle of craft.