Slip
Liquid alignment of fabric and outer thigh. Slip. Which mimics the thing it’s meant to allow. Passage of air on either side of the tongue whose meat as if to thicken the likeness of substance and sound meets just that plot of upper palate behind the teeth. And yet at normal speed the very aptness loses its full bouquet. “Salomé was wearing red pumps and the palest of pale blue satin slips.” I would in my predictable girlhood have much preferred a word I took to be scented like Giverny: “Salomé was wearing red pumps and a pale blue satin chemise.” It’s taken me all this time to hear the truer difference—slip— which only wants a little lingering in the mouth to summon how it thinks about the contours of the body. So the speed of it— slip—and the lingering can resume their proper tug- of-war. The boy they’d had the wit to cast as Salomé, both nude and may-as-well-be- nude, was every inch presentable, flawless, as though one might live in the body and feel no shame. No wonder, forced to endure as they did the reek of the tidal Thames, our predecessors took this for the universal object of desire. The history of the English stage right there in the slippage between not- quite and already over and gone. And yes I get the part about predation the grooming in all of its sordid detail, I was never half so fair as this but fair enough to have been fair game. In a town with limited options. I’ve spent more than half my life trying to rid myself of aftermath so let me be enchanted now. Youth at a safe remove.
Copyright © 2019 by Linda Gregerson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 12, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.