We were born
knowing nothing of our bodies except
that we needed to discard them
and after years of subjecting these bodies
to reckless gymnastics, frequent,
deliberately contracted illnesses,
general lack of plenitude,
and nonspecific sorrow,
at last it was our turn to rappel down the cliff.
Rope shot through our hands.
Something burned behind us—not the Town—
and we were weary,
bent necks topped with withered faces,
our flesh in ghastly shambles.
Some of us were so empty we billowed,
some of us had shoulders
rubbed to nearly nothing
by the backpacks we carried.
Who had seen us before?
Various tellers, conductors, and bakers.
The Chancellor.
The moths in our clothes, the mice in our walls.
We peeled our dinner from the rocks at the shore,
we were prepared to stay, we’d wait.
Once I was faultlessly beautiful, and my life depended upon it. I groomed my trembling, long-legged animal. I felt great love, I felt great fear: either way, to you, it hardly mattered.
French-braided Elizabeth, naked beneath a mohair blanket,
the cousin, in flip-flops and gold splash pants
(a modest person,
whose only goal was to have sex with God)—
under the slight, wet wind we tended first to our fires,
then only to our breathing,
as we marked the arrival
of nothing and no one.
That night, we all lay in the tent,
watching the bodies of insects
in shadow cross over its skin,
until we all dropped into
the same sickened dream.
For all this time we’d thought the sensation of living
was a hand at our throat in a grip
that was ours to loosen, once we reached the shore—
for all these years we’d held the belief
that we’d been designed for this journey,
that we were worth being greeted at the end of it
by faceless beings who would approach from all sides,
pull the pins from our limbs and our hair,
and lay upon us,
with nearly
unbearable tenderness,
dozens of hands—