Things in Light Poetry Series 2014: Rebecca Aronson

Gorge

Sometimes what got the upper hand

would send a body over wholesale,

a ragdoll in a barrel, a dropped cannonball,

but never, I think, a swan dive.

Looking in at the feathery tree tops—

soft with sunlight or rain

above a slip of a stream

pebbled with bright discs

and calling all sideshows down to it—

come moss come fern

and burrow and jagged outreach

come sharp pins of light and pillowed shadow

come and be taken in—

who could but lean a little forward?

And what is a tide but a calling in?
And the body a body,

a structure building itself

towards its own one end, just as it builds itself

towards everything else.

And what is a tide but return?

Every overflow gathers what it can.

Every flood sweeps at the reachable world

with a quickness that could be said to be greed.

It is all the body’s wanting: this world and the other and the other.

Peril

When you ask as you move your lips along

my arm tasting where I am I say I’m

here right here and this means I am pulling

my self down into my body again

from where it has drifted—though I do try

to watch—past the periphery. I am

forever slipping away unnoticed.

This is true: desire is peril. I want.

I want. I bay at the door of wanting.

The trouble is the door—it slides from side

to side, it goes incognito or a-

way. Unlike me; there I am, knocking, see,

in the wrong place, pulling the dresser’s knob

for instance and waiting to be let in.

Hold

While we were waiting

the storm took down

all the power lines in the world.

We were a little surprised

but soon in the dark

(when we could no longer discern

our own palms)

we discovered we could float

from our bodies

just as untethered balloons

slide free from tiny wrists

where they had been tied

with provisional knots

and are followed then

by all the eyes in the vicinity

until nothing remains to be seen.

***

Rebecca Aronson's first book of poetry is called Creature, Creature. She has poems recently or forthcoming in Quarterly West, Cutbank, Cimarron Review, Tattoo Highway and others. She coordinates the CNM Visiting Writer series and facilitates a student and community writing group.