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    We Live in Bodies
    We Live in Bodies
    We Live in Bodies
    Ebook86 pages43 minutes

    We Live in Bodies

    By Ellen Doré Watson

    ()

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    About this ebook

    "You will close this book exhilarated by its quirky, passionate poems and grateful for its huge heart fired and fed by a prodigious imagination. This is brilliant, urgent work."—Thomas Lux

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAlice James Books
    Release dateAug 1, 2016
    ISBN9781938584909
    We Live in Bodies

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      Book preview

      We Live in Bodies - Ellen Doré Watson

      ONE

      Wafer

      Why on a perfectly crisp January day did you change

      your month-old arrangement of cells and simply

      dissolve into nothingness like a communion wafer

      in one more sinner’s mouth?  Finally, to have a seed

      take root inside the part of me I never learned

      to own, finally after so many graphs and new months’

      blood, so many folded hands sprouting from white

      sleeves over desktops, so many reverent moments after sex

      with the bowl of me tipped up and waiting, a nest

      of twenty minutes, as he tilted a water glass to my lips

      how many times before sleep, and now—four slim weeks

      after you became a matter of blessed fact, a euphoric

      knot of nausea I sat hugging, grinning my goofy

      we beat the odds grin—to have you dead in there,

      a bit of the bit you are leaking down my thigh:

      how could you leave us here, two people with every reason

      to rage and no one to call cruel?

      It Will Take How Long

      1

      My father’s sermons lasted twenty minutes.  Finally

      we get to sing the last hymn.  Ten-thousand-sixty minutes

      until the next possible funny story featuring me

      or my brothers.  Time is like money: grown-ups

      control it.  Worms and their bloody pulp

      on wet asphalt, all because adults hurry so—

      except when they’re locked in the long tube

      their voices make.  Think of the wait

      before they notice a child can pour her own milk

      —and the way they calibrate the shaky

      white flow of confidence.  Time is not kind

      to children except when they sleep.  Are we

      there yet?  Am I me yet?  It will take

      how long to build this mirror?

      2

      It takes as long to cook black beans as to drive to the shore.  It takes as long to sweat as to blink.  As long to weed the garden as you have.  It takes as long to fall in love as to fall out.  I can iron six shirts in four commercials.  It takes as long for the sun to creep across the rug to my thigh as it does for me to decide not to tell one brother what the other has said.  As long for the bud to open as she took dying.  It takes me longer to wake than to fall asleep.  Thoughts rise up and brush past cobwebs, too soft to set a rhythm.  The beans are done.

      3

      I can part time like filmy curtains, or slap it aside—

      any strategy so as not to get stuck.  It’s taken a long

      necklace of years to learn this.  Everything but our pagan,

      automatic breathing is a choice we make in time

      or time makes for us.  Are you facing yourself or a door?

      I have complained away a lot of years, handed over

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