Rebecca Aronson
Gorge


Sometimes what got the upper hand
would send a body over wholesale,
a ragdoll in a barrel, a dropped cannonball,
but never, I think, a swan dive.

Looking in at the feathery tree tops—
soft with sunlight or rain
above a slip of a stream
pebbled with bright discs
and calling all sideshows down to it—

come moss come fern
and burrow and jagged outreach
come sharp pins of light and pillowed shadow
come and be taken in—

who could but lean a little forward?

And what is a tide but a calling in?
And the body a body,
a structure building itself
towards its own one end, just as it builds itself
towards everything else.

And what is a tide but return?
Every overflow gathers what it can.
Every flood sweeps at the reachable world
with a quickness that could be said to be greed.
It is all the body’s wanting: this world and the other and the other.

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