A Refining Fire

I used to imagine that the body was a sort of fleshy gospel, bound together by mind and ligaments. Years of smutch, and oily reduction, daily, a thin scum to be skimmed - a process of dross elimination, but each year there is a teaspoonful of loss that cannot be explained, made up or accounted for, more a lessoning and not an alchemy. If this kind of culinary reduction keeps losing the fat of me I will be as nothing, and maybe that’s the point.