July 28, 2024Elegy Beginning on a Line by Ross Gay
The bullet craves the warmth of a body,
but forgets the body it leaves. Allow
me the metaphor, this aliveness
of everything—the last leg of the trail, scarring
the mountain’s rigid face. A friend tells me
two Spanish names for the steaming blue
aperture in an alpine hot spring: el ojo
de agua & donde nace el agua. I touch the mouth
of the coffee mug to mine, too distracted
with dodging the clotted white
flecks of coconut milk to see them spare me
my reflection. Headlines yank my heart
into my ears like the drum of distant fire-
works, so I walk to the holler, permission to clear
my mind. The mouth of the creek is one body
entering another. That is, a small river, emptied
of all it carried. Spanish has a structure
that makes your happenings
happen to you, takes what we’ve done
and does it to us. See: se me rompe el país—
my country is breaking
itself to me. I want to be blameless
as every birth, every baby crying
for help as it leaves one warmth
for want of another. A poem,
in its hunger, craves the soft bone
of the paper, but misses itself
to the chamber of its pen. The first act of
motherhood is a womb,
giving up. We’re all born
barreling toward beauty and a life
of yielding—how can a word mean gain
and surrender? I’ve strolled
this stream for years and never witnessed
more than dragonflies and crawdads. But today, I’m struck
by the slick of a turtle’s obsidian
shell under the surface, stippled with copper
sun. In certain light, everything’s the color of a gun
and what is lost to her.
from Poets Respond