Today, Yesterday, After My Death

by Maureen Alsop

I saw you, and once thought you were real.

The air clotted my thin lips with confessions.

There were star points and if I drew them back

through the water, they were planetary and smooth

like the men’s eyes—marbles cold in her mouth. 

I remembered her. I remembered her, though I did not

know her. She died, directionless as her body drifted

to Michealmas Cay. No thanks to a map. Now clicking—

pelvis bone and coral—she’s the sound of chimes,

the clarity of other realms in wave’s circuitry.          

The commerce of the body is both heavy and tender. The body, too, is myth.

I am to see her only as sound so there is one dimension

only. Light damages the object of the sea. And the sea

relents in a deep whirl beneath my skin, impermeable,

fear like water, is diluted and uncertain. That voice, her

voice within waters and groves, shaken from streams, eddying out

the last lake, is the voice of imperfect stars. A condition

like each condition, terrestrial. I was bound by a great thing:

the love to love you, and now to love you without form.