The Carrying

by Ada Limón

  computers swinging in it unwieldily at your

  side. I remember we broke into laughter

  when we saw each other. What was between

  us wasn’t a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed

  over. It came out fully formed, ready to run.

  MASTERING

  I’m in Texas at a bar with a friend who doesn’t drink

  anymore and I’ve missed him. We order food and share

  and talk aging bodies and Mexico and how the mind goes mad.

  We talk about a friend who’s going blind, the pressure

  on his brain, how much we admire his fierce allegiance

  to this world, his unflagging wail into the abyss.

  I like being at this bar with a man I admire

  but don’t love, don’t need to fleece for affection. It makes

  me feel all grown up, like I should get a good-job chip too.

  We talk about marriage and the tender skin

  of the other. I lay out the plans for my upcoming

  wedding—a mountain named after the moon,

  blooms in my hair, my beloved.

  We’ve known each other almost fifteen years, my friend

  with eyes the color of a clear cenote. I trust him. He leans in,

  tells me the real miracle, more than marriage, the thing that makes you

  believe there might be a god after all, is the making of a child.

  He stares at me, but I am not there anymore. I don’t say

  we’ve tried a long time, been sad, been happy,

  that perhaps the only thing I can make

  is love and art. I want to tell him that’s enough. Isn’t it? Isn’t love

  that doesn’t result in a seed, a needy body, another suckling animal,

  still love? Isn’t that supernatural? Screw your god. He’s showing

  me a photo now of his child and I’m unfolding and folding

  the napkin. He’s pointing out how amazing his child is. I order

  a drink because I can. (And maybe because he can’t.) He retreats

  in his seat. I take a long sip and really look into his eyes.

  I want him to notice what he said, how a woman might feel agony,

  emptiness, how he’s lucky it’s me he said it to because I won’t

  vaporize him. I sip again, I want him to see how much pleasure

  I can handle, my tongue a tuning fork, how mute and mirror I can be,

  even with these ordinary wonders he can’t see swirling around us.

  THE LAST THING

  First there was the blue wing

  of a scraggly loud jay tucked

  into the shrubs. Then the bluish-

  black moth drunkenly tripping

  from blade to blade. Then

  the quiet that came roaring

  in like the R. J. Corman over

  Broadway near the RV shop.

  These are the last three things

  that happened. Not in the universe,

  but here, in the basin of my mind,

  where I’m always making a list

  for you, recording the day’s minor

  urchins: silvery dust mote, pistachio

  shell, the dog eating a sugar

  snap pea. It’s going to rain soon,

  close clouds bloated above us,

  the air like a net about to release

  all the caught fishes, a storm

  siren in the distance. I know

  you don’t always understand,

  but let me point to the first

  wet drops landing on the stones,

  the noise like fingers drumming

  the skin. I can’t help it. I will

  never get over making everything

  such a big deal.

  LOVE POEM WITH APOLOGIES FOR MY APPEARANCE

  Sometimes, I think you get the worst

  of me. The much-loved loose forest-green

  sweatpants, the long bra-less days, hair

  knotted and uncivilized, a shadowed brow

  where the devilish thoughts do their hoofed

  dance on the brain. I’d like to say this means

  I love you, the stained white cotton T-shirt,

  the tears, pistachio shells, the mess of orange

  peels on my desk, but it’s different than that.

  I move in this house with you, the way I move

  in my mind, unencumbered by beauty’s cage.

  I do like I do in the tall grass, more animal-me

  than much else. I’m wrong, it is that I love you,

  but it’s more that when you say it back, lights

  out, a cold wind through curtains, for maybe

  the first time in my life, I believe it.

  SWAY

  What is it about words that make the world

  fit easier? Air and time.

  Since last we spoke, I’ve been better.

  I slept again once the Pink Moon

  moved off a little, put her pants back on, let me be.

  Are you sleeping again?

  I’m home in the bluegrass now, one of the places

  my body feels at ease. I can’t stop

  putting plants in the ground. There’s a hunger in me,

  a need to watch something grow. A neighbor brought me

  five new hostas to plant along the fence line that’s shaded all afternoon.

  As I dug into the ground making room around the maple,

  I found a bunch of wild strawberries, flowering.

  I let them be: the heart berry. Red,

  like our rage. The red of your desert. Your heart too.

  My neighbor and her wife bring me plants and chive pesto

  and we let our dogs run under the fence

  to multiply their space. Small beasts running in more air.

  I have been alone a long time this year.

  She says when she looks at me, she is reminded of time.

  I didn’t know what she meant, so she repeated,

  When I see you, I become very aware of time.

  A grackle, now two, are joining us here, in the vines; they’re

  too heavy for the young spring branches.

  My man is coming home today, driving ten hours

  to be home, and by god, I will throw my body toward him,

  the way you wrote: How is it that we know what we are?

  Maybe this letter is to say, if it is red where you are,

  know there is also green, the serrated leaves of dandelion, lemon balm,

  purple sage, peppermint, a small plum tree by the shed.

  I don’t know how to make medicine, or cure what’s scarring

  this planet, but I know that last night, the train came roaring

  right as I needed it. I was alone and I was time, but

  the train made a noise so I would listen. I was standing so

  close, a body on a bridge, so that I could feel how

  the air shifted to make room for the train. How it’s easier

  if we become more like a body of air, branches, and make room

  for this red charging thing that barrels through us,

  how afterward our leaves shake and stand straighter.

  SACRED OBJECTS

  I’m driving down to Tennessee, but before I get there, I stop at the Kentucky state line to fuel up and pee. The dog’s in the car and the weather’s fine. As I pump the gas a man in his black Ford F-150 yells out his window about my body. I actually can’t remember what it was. Nice tits. Nice ass. Something I’ve been hearing my whole life. Except sometimes it’s not Nice ass, it’s Big ass or something a bit more cruel. I pretend not to hear him. I pretend my sunglasses hide my whole body. Right then, a man with black hair, who could be an uncle of mine, pulls by in his truck and nods. He’s towing a trailer that’s painted gray with white letters. The letters read: Sacred Objects. I imagine a trailer full of Las Vírgenes de Guadalupe—concrete, marble, or wood—all wobbly from their travels. All of these f
emale statues hidden together in this secret shadowed spot on their way to find a place where they’ll be safe, even worshipped, or at the very least allowed to live in the light.

  SOMETIMES I THINK MY BODY LEAVES A SHAPE IN THE AIR

  I slipped my hands in the cold salt froth

  of the Pacific Ocean just two days ago. Planetlike

  and everything aquatic, even the sky, where an eagle

  unfolded so much larger than my shadow.

  I was struck translucent. A good look for me!

  My hands were slick with the water I was born next to,

  and there was a whole hour that I felt lived in, like a room.

  I wish to be untethered and tethered all at once, my skin

  singes the sheets and there’s a tremor in the marrow.

  On the way back to the city, a sign read:

  “Boneless, Heartless, Binge-Worthy.”

  Next to it was a fuzzy photograph of a jellyfish.

  Imagine the body free of its anchors,

  the free-swimming,

  a locomotion propelling us, pulse by pulse,

  but here I am: the slow caboose of clumsy effort.

  When the magician’s wife died, how could they be sure

  he hadn’t just turned her into ether, released her

  like a white bird begging for the sky outside the cage?

  Creeley says, The plan is the body. What if he’s wrong?

  I am always in too many worlds, sand sifting through my hands,

  another me speeding through the air, another me waving

  from a train window watching you

  waving from a train window watching me.

  CANNIBAL WOMAN

  I’m looking for the right words, but all I can think of is:

  parachute or ice water.

  There’s nothing but this sailboat inside me, slowly trying to catch

  a wind, maybe there’s an old man on it, maybe a small child,

  all I know is they’d like to go somewhere. They’d like to see the sail

  straighten, go tense, and take them someplace. But instead they wait,

  a little tender wave comes and leaves them

  right where they were all along.

  How did this happen? No wind I can conjure anymore.

  My father told me the story of a woman larger than a mountain,

  who crushed redwoods with her feet, who could swim a whole lake

  in two strokes—she ate human flesh and terrorized the people.

  I loved that story. She was bigger than any monster, or Bigfoot,

  or Loch Ness creature—

  a woman who was like weather, as enormous as a storm.

  He’d tell me how she walked through the woods, each tree

  coming down, branch to sawdust, leaf to skeleton, each mountain

  pulverized to dust.

  Then they set a trap. A hole so deep she could not climb out of it.

  (I have known that trap.)

  Then people set her on fire with torches. So she could not eat them

  anymore, could not steal their children or ruin their trees.

  I liked this part too. The fire. I imagined how it burned her mouth,

  her skin, and how she tried to stand but couldn’t, how it almost felt

  good to her—as if something was finally meeting her desire with desire.

  The part I didn’t like was the end, how each ash that flew up in the night

  became a mosquito, how she is still all around us

  in the dark, multiplied.

  I’ve worried my whole life that my father told me this because

  she is my anger: first comes this hunger, then abyss, then fire,

  and then a nearly invisible fly made of ash goes on and on eating mouthful

  after mouthful of those I love.

  WIFE

  I’m not yet comfortable with the word,

  its short clean woosh that sounds like

  life. At dinner last night my single girls

  said in admonition, It’s not wife-approved

  about a friend’s upcoming trip. Their

  eyes rolled up and over and out of their

  pretty young heads. Wife, why does it

  sound like a job? I want a wife, the famous

  feminist wrote, a wife who will keep my

  clothes clean, ironed, mended, replaced

  when need be. A word that could be made

  easily into maid. A wife that does, fixes,

  soothes, honors, obeys. Housewife,

  fishwife, bad wife, good wife, what’s

  the word for someone who stares long

  into the morning, unable to even fix tea

  some days, the kettle steaming over

  loud like a train whistle, she who cries

  in the mornings, she who tears a hole

  in the earth and cannot stop grieving,

  the one who wants to love you, but often

  isn’t good at even that, the one who

  doesn’t want to be diminished

  by how much she wants to be yours.

  FROM THE ASH INSIDE THE BONE

  Right when all I want to do is tell you a story,

  the way wiingaashk (is that the word,

  the name for sweetgrass that Kimmerer gives?)

  have settled in to the middle raised bed,

  the way I greet them in the morning, sometimes

  run my fingers through them like a child’s hair,

  right when I wanted to tell you a good thing,

  a stone to hold and rub in the pocket like skin,

  right then, the sickness comes again. I want to write

  of the body as desirous, reedy, fine on the tongue

  on the thigh, but my blood’s got the spins again, twice

  today the world went bonkers. Cracked, careened,

  and I come up all clown and out of whack. My body

  can’t be trusted. MRI says my brain’s hunky-dory

  so it’s just these bouts sometimes, the ground rises

  straight up, or I’m trying to walk on water,

  except it’s not water it’s land and it’s moving when

  it should be something to count on. A field of something

  green and steady. Sleep is familiar, though the birds

  are starting earlier and earlier, and I keep dreaming

  that the sky’s turning to ash, or that I’m falling

  through the clouds—tops of pine trees and oceans below.

  What does Lorca say? Compadre, quiero cambiar

  mi caballo por su casa. Friend, I want to trade this horse

  of illness for your house that praises the throat.

  I’ll settle for these words you gave me: sweet smoke

  and I’ll plant them into my chest so I can take this

  circling spell and light it on fire.

  TIME IS ON FIRE

  I meet a physicist at the party and immediately

  ask him if it’s true that time doesn’t exist, time

  being important to me. Even now, I’m older,

  time’s crypt and wish curl around me like ghost wind.

  He doesn’t answer so maybe I don’t exist. One day:

  nothing. Another: mushrooms or mildew, or some

  inching sprout, or some leaf gone black and dead.

  Time does that. The arrow we ride into the now,

  then into the future, does not pull out of the skin

  backward. Or does it? The past is happening.

  Pampas grass slicing the thumb before the dozer

  came and cut the grass out like a cancer, my old cat

  Smoke leaving dead birds on the garden posts,

  the first man, the first woman, the madrone’s rust-

  colored berries of fall, each second is in me. The arrow

  we ride like a horse, mute and fast, retraces and races,

  so that right now even as my valley burns, it rewinds

  too, each b
lack ash rubble pile pulls itself back

  into a dear home, a living cat leaps into the understory,