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Copyright @ 2014 by Hannah Sanghee Park. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on July 22, 2014.
There you exist in water.
Unending sketch and erase
of waves on the sea surface.
Today, you’ll be all the words
I wanted to say: look, they’re so
pretty in that second they
surface. You almost didn’t
see them. You didn’t see them.
Sinuous, so commitment’s
a strange shape to hold and take.
I loved the water of you, the snake of
you, everything amorphous and short-lived,
as I expected nothing to last of us.
But when the waves break I still call them by name.
Far cars, numerous.
Lullaby (by a lull)
and I pretend (I-10 as ocean).
And dream (DNA remade)
and dream. Maker
(remake me), better me
this time.
Like a frame within a frame the fossil
carried a carcass, a carapace,
and its own casket in another casket,
its own natural sarcophagus.
I never told anyone this story:
in a summer like this I ate a nectarine
until its rough corduroy pit, continued
rolling and chewing it until it hinged
open, and an inert spider, sitting
in white wisp, was inside like a small jewel.
How does a thing feel real. The layers
comprising me are, reductively, soft
hard, soft, an easy sift to the truth
but the hard sell and swallow done anyway.