Some kind of relaxed inquest
I gathered first and sat with.
It was your hesitation that lured me
sense that you’d lifted your traces
off solid ground
set them in dark water.
White belly, sharpened nail,
I began the translation?—the carrying—
the air thickened with intention
to pull each grooved line through it,
ease then dash, a flickering
hand chasing a sleeve of light.
Could I net your desire briefly—
how you finally let your “I” want
so cleanly—set it surging
across salted vowels?
Can a dancer hold an invisible fish?
Three small fish, the bulging sun
the part of the song where it falls down
over the rocks;
for a little while, rock your leaving
your anyway, that rare biting smile.
You weren’t all communion and falling down
and earth rising up.
Also: whoever I was and nobody and hopeless
suspended in the gaps,
the whole body collapsing
into one gesture made
of so many shadows.
There is a moment you return to
where you come forward nearly lifting
off the page
toward the ease of you—
and you know how that goes, don’t you?—
then fanning the address open to we
twinning us in your grief.
Oh, to be a mirror held at one’s death.
But you lived.
I placed your words in the basket
of my bones—
swivel and plow—
then turned the basket
upside-down.
Jennifer K. Sweeney
Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of Foxlogic, Fireweed, Little Spells, James Laughlin Award winner How to Live on Bread and Music, and Salt Memory. The collaborative chapbook, Dear Question, with L.I. Henley, is newly released from Glass Lyre Press. A Pushcart Prize winner, her poems have recently appeared in About Place, Cider Press Review, Orion, Plant-Human Quarterly, Rust & Moth, The Shore, Sixth Finch, and Waxwing. She teaches poetry workshops at University of Redlands in California. She did, in fact, dance Mary Oliver's poem in 2001, at a VCFA arts residency.
