After the Body by Cleopatra Mathis

Author:Cleopatra Mathis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

POEM FOR MARRIAGE

Pretend you have never been in love,

pretend that nothing has changed you,

that it is possible to live without violation.

You could go back to the girl you were

at fifteen, reading for hours in a kind of sleep,

angry to be awakened—the lives around you

never the emotional equal of those

you lived on the page. Those years

belonged to a loneliness you never questioned;

so complete, the sweet ache of the self

gazed back at you from the mirror

as if she were the stranger. Now if you wake alone,

it’s only because the other is still sleeping.

At the edge of the Atlantic, you rise

in slow motion, needing to leave it all

undisturbed: the mutual plans and concerns,

the temporary obliteration of sex.

Exhilarated by the privacy and the light, you walk out

to the beach, and watching the tide play

its trick of distance, decide to go

to the land’s farthest reach, that ghostly point

where the water’s body joins the sky.

You walk fast and straight out, through shallow pools

becoming more frequent and deep until you sink

sometimes to the knee. Until there’s more

empty water than sand and it is so clean

that nothing speaks of living; even the one

sea-rotted body of a man o’war is no more

than a marker your eye uses to keep perspective

on what’s large, what’s small. Looking back,

you can barely see the toy-sized house,

white on white in the haze: it has nothing

to do with you. Everything out here

has the holy cast of blue, everything is filled

with wind. And finally, the sand’s last edge—

the entire ocean looms. How easy,

you think, to take one more step;

to walk until your legs flail and go useless,

your body washing forward, over and under

with its involuntary struggle, and you turn

from the confines of breath to a world

wholly imagined…. But love

has had its way with you; that tide pulls you back

to its fragmentary shore of loss and gain.

Until you are not yourself but part

of another story, as if your life were a child

crying for milk.

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