Barnegat Light, New Jersey—April 4, 2015
Because looking at myself w/ out you beside me is unnatural
& though the light is all wrong—your camera slung & up
the light feels right to me, warm & soft, your chest pressed
towards my back, both our heads angling towards the dock,
boat slips on the bay—all the scallops secure in the sea still,
their bone-less bodies soft. & our own getting softer each day.
Sometimes the mirror makes our features fun-house style
& we’re way more old age than the teen age we most times
feel,
or the slight of shutter promises supple & smooth, where edge
& ravine & straight up wrinkle have arrived & settled in
like vulnerable house guests we don’t have the heart to kick
out.
How comfortable they’ve become all over our fine faces
& my neck—how they’ve become familiar w/ our privacy. How
we’ve begun to cradle them. Stitch & loom. In the photograph
there we are—chins tilted towards one another, mouths closed
& turned up. A type of satisfaction dead in this middle we’re
both in.
Copyright © 2015 by Ellen Hagan. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 18, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.