You take your eyes off the water, off
whether I go or am taken.
Either I swim
along or away from shore.
When my feet no longer stand me in the slick
grave of shells, my body, to the neck,
is the water.
The great lie is that we are
lighter than water, that we would rise
if left to.
When really, we struggle and churn
to keep the air in, surging to stay upward
long after having forgotten
how to crawl.
My toe opens against some shard
or shell, and salt rushes the wound
as blood rushes out. The two forces of liquid
do not cancel each other.
I am a little phrase of music, the rhythm and verse
of an arm’s muscle memory
learning the pull of land against ocean’s tongue.
I ask return as coin or drift or softened glass.
None of this you see, there on a blanket
on a chair, refusing the sun’s bath
in your long sleeves,
in your story’s sealess world.
A collection of vessels wrecks in my throat.
My stain of blood on a bleached towel
reveals all the independent threads
tamed and crossed, reveal how,
out of raw fiber, fabric is made
from two directions.
The way waves upend direction
and throw water down my lungs
so I can’t say the sky
is not blasting me the same as sea—this way
I will remember a phrase by rote.
All things disaster sooner or later.
©
lives in St. Louis and teaches writing at St. Louis Community College. Her book, Each Crumbling House was published in 2010 and received the Perugia Press Book Prize. Her poems and essays have recently appeared in Copper Nickel, Town Creek Poetry, Connotation Press, and The Collagist.
We’ve published two more poems by Gee: “Los Angeles Pastoral” and “Sparrow.”
