The body’s fear is to be forcibly overthrown

and so it sets out this fence of pain

to warn it when the world has crept too close.

The intruder intrudes, the skin shrieks,

and the body hastens away.  This barrier

gives us our identity, marking off

the territory of the self, like seeing

different farmers’ fields from a plane:

those multicolored shapes each with fences

set in between.  What would happen otherwise?

Would we blend with the sky, become

like cloud or smoke, or would we merge

with each other?  This woman that I love,

if we felt no pain would I so force myself

upon her that we would join together

like two plucked chickens in a plastic bag?

Is it just pain that keeps us separate,

that forms the frontier of our loneliness

and without it we would all jumble together

into one bright color?  But the body insists

on being individual and erects its barriers

which protect it even from its desires, 

since one can be defeated from within

as well as from without; and I remember

a child I knew at a camp, a boy about ten,

who had been born without a sense of pain

and who had gnawed off half his fingers,

bitten pieces from his arms, now covered

with bandages, and how we had to spy on him

just to protect him from this private feast.

I would check his cabin late at night,

flick on my flashlight and find him wide awake,

his face caught in the circle of light,

his own flesh in his mouth, chewing, chewing,

as if he meant to pass his whole being

across his tongue.  The coils of barbed wire

surrounding his body were gone and he was

slipping away.  What secret place did he hope

to reach through the doorway of his mouth?

Or was that place simply his own life?

Our sense of touch limits and defines us.

Without it this boy was a shadow, a dream

of his own imagination.  How else could he survive?

Pain corroborates the world.  His body’s

taste between his teeth proved he was alive.