The Bodywearers
I think we have forgotten
why we wear our bodies.
We drag them from our beds
each morning and consider:
I am blonde. I am large.
I am scaly and yellow.
Look down. See the body
among the pillows? That
is not you, though you wear
it. See those hips and the knee jutting out
and the stem of that sex?
Neither is that you. Your body
contains you, a mite of sand
buried in the tongue of a clam.
Look there: a woman Titian
would have painted in long, lusty strokes,
dying for the figure of a waif.
Or there: the white girl who came of age
inside her Asian body.
Or this fragile man
in his huge man’s case. We all
have this – this approximate us.
Stop it. You wear your body
because the wasp stings and
because the pebble wedges hard
between your nail and
the flesh of your toe. You
wear it to smell your lover’s
hot breath and the skunk’s
potent, unbearable stuff. To taste
the sweat in the valley between
her breasts, the bitter blade
of grass, the sourmilk musk
your daughter breathes. And to hear
the winter-stiff pines bristle in wind.
I say to you: Look at the pock
on my forehead. I am looking
at your small breasts, your blue
and nerveless tooth. And I am
throwing your body away. I will
strip myself to the core
for you. Or I can wear myself
the wrong way out. See the mole
on my back? I see the dappled flab
at your middle. We are what we are,
bodywearers only. So lay your body
over mine and use it. Use it and use it
until our souls spark like flints.
Living in this Land
Driving the gravel home tonight,
I brake for possum.
I come to a complete
stop, surprised by this one’s
carelessness, the needling
of his rat nose
toward the hot headlights,
and his stumbling, everywhere limbs.
I honk once to startle him back
to the ditch. Moments later,
in two leaping stones of light,
I recognize the eyes of a bounding
doe. I recall my husband’s words: where
there’s one, there’s two. When I finally
hit the blacktop, the luminescent
white lines and yellow dashes
reassure me some. But then there’s the
bat that beats its wings against my
windshield. And the milky frogs
that lunge at the wheel wells.
It’s like a war out here.
I know inside my truck I’m nearly
invincible, but you can see how steadfast
I must be to defend my
right to be here.
Milk
After my daughter’s birth,
I am obsessed with milk.
Often, I recline on the bed,
tuck her head in the pit of
my arm to feed. At two months,
she reads the cue, widens her mouth,
purses her deep pink lips, and
tugs a nipple deftly in. In moments,
I submit to the pull, the steady emptying
of my fullest breast. Before
long, she has put me to sleep.
Gone to her, I dream of newborns
left to freeze among the frosty reeds.
I find a blue boy in a ditch,
wailing, minutes old. I pluck him
off the ground like a gourd, yank
my sweater, offer my breast. My nipple
fills his mouth and stoppers the mewing,
but his cry has worked its let-down magic:
warm milk fills his throat, his little soul.
In my dream, he suckles until he becomes
my daughter — fat and soft,
feet hot as lumps of coal.
I wake to find my daughter dozing,
nursing in her sleep. It really is this simple,
my dream-milk has told me, for a mother
to change the world
one belly at a time.
