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HERE LIES ONE:
REMEMBERING YOU THROUGH CAVAFY
And if you
After 25 years, return to sand, to silver
glints
Of gum wrappers
and lead weights on broken
Test line, return
to the spot where he removed
Your swimsuit so deftly and posed you
there
And drew you to
him after he drew you, your
27-year-old body,
in India ink with a wash of grey
At twilight, the magic hour when the
sky’s veiled
Violet, when the
first stars pock it like rain on water
And below them the
lake lies, gray zinc, and waves are
Wrinkles looking for someone’s brow—but
not yours,
For
you’ll be ink on ivory forever—and unchanged.
What you didn’t
realize is that ivory cracks and after
Find her poor
He dies at this same spot where you
were first filled
Up with his child
a quarter of a century ago you yield,
You crack and
craze; you unravel like fishing line or
Shot silk or kapok; you float into
the air, into the water;
Waves wash over
you then, when grief finally beaches
Itself like a hull
in the sands of your heart. The
lake
Laps back and forth and fossils
wash up on sand
And a bass leaps,
flares silver and green, and falls…
And after you
cry, you slip out of your swimsuit
And you look at your breasts that
pleased one man
And two children,
at your belly that cocooned them,
At the scar that he
kissed when you first made love
Ithaka
After your C-section and you were
shy, when he said
It is coming home o it is --the only sure
things now are
Breast belly crescent
scar cunt—this is you, this is
Your body, and can this body so set
in its ways
Please another, will
another wander to find you
And feel at home?
And you slip into the water
As though you were slipping back
into your slip and
You float and it
is satin shock it is cold and clinging
And your breasts
bob and your hair’s gilt
In the late afternoon sun and you cry
just a little more
And you climb on
the rock where you once lay
On top of him and
you lie there till you’re warm
Won’t have fooled
you
And you leave off your sundress, your
sapphire slip,
Your sandals (each
dribbling sand like an hourglass),
Your
sunglasses, your St. Christopher, you gather
Them up in a towel and naked you
walk to the water
Your face wavers and
his words echo and you do
See that maybe
there is still something to you,
Something of the figurehead, bare-breasted
ravaged
By wind and wrinkling waves, a difference
That
perhaps he still sees, and you promise you’ll
Learn to promise to love and honor and
cherish
Someone else and
you scatter the last of his ashes
And scratch his
name in the sand and watch
She has given you
Water filling the letters you have
carved so deeply
That it will be late
morning before the very
Last serif has
been erased by the waves.
