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Shell / Texture / Stroking / Almost
For reference I create shade and shape
to discover which body is the frame Breathless in the way her belly slumps at the hips. In that old bicycle landscape a beach appears. Give me your face, please. I hover around it and she around the edges lightly touching The belly diagrams itself like a helipad the downward stroking triangle She tells me a story and I remember it as if it belongs to me Attempting to dry myself on the astroturf porch. How to catch a crab and put it to sleep. She slants down like the ceiling above the stairway, then vanishes triangular I’m mothering. How to be a soft touch. Red nail polish spilled on the porch is no matter no matter, a card table stretching into a pier What is behind the dulled back door. Careful to look between the kicking legs of the crab for the emergence of lullaby What is behind the face I find familiar Imagine the angle of a box lid closing over me as I lounge among the toys. After several years my memory acquires grain to incorporate the age of the photos An even tan in black and white. Each tendril of her bathing suit top folds over like the ear of a retriever, like a harlequin’s costume, like I’m listening up against a collarbone. If a body appears only once in a landscape. A crease from hip to hip, another and another meeting between the legs I refuse to put it away What you say is impossible because the body is always in the landscape. In the Bath House, Without Glasses In the one wet room in our skin singular among the tiles One bath is hot. One bath is cold. One line of water breathes down from the tiled ceiling. Once upon a time I opened my eyes inside your body. Gently feeling around the grouted edges. She put me in the bath with my cousins, where the Yiddish for vagina is very similar to puppy. I lie down on the wet table to be scrubbed talked about in another language new-bellied We flopped around in the water with our washcloths and shampoo bottles. She’s always a body in the room, careful and clean. I can’t see anything but the surface of the water just in front of me / and even then, it laps clear through the tiles If I were allowed to be tattooed it would be mostly letters like markers in the cemetery This one I lost / This one / Usually one body in the room at least belongs to me, but it separates In the other room, the men bury themselves in hot salt. It was traditional to go to the mikvah but those buildings are all churches now. She’s laughing at me in another language / unable to breathe in the steam I know my skin is around here somewhere Near the strange edges of my thighs I’m just a frame stretched over the table for cleaning She all has dark hair and wide hips, a blur of shape and shadow, slipping around from body to body. Is this even my shampoo bottle? Whatever. Someone empties a bucket of cold milk over my face. |
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