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Amanda Yskamp
Body Chronicle
In the milk
little calcium cups
line up on shelves
to form the bones,
in the spinach,
green determination.
One eats:
To become:
tiger gullibility
on the pancakes,
the blooming thought
in broccoli flowers,
an egg, soft-boiled,
useful as protein.
*
* *
Teethbuds, the zipper
of the spine, lids
smooth and fitted
to the cheek as Brancusi,
minute sprigs of reach and ask,
my baby is inside,
the size of a large plum
babushka nesting doll, inner
and inner, of quick
and juice.
*
* *
Where the two lobes of the head came round, drawing a groove between lips and nose, where a trail of moles ran down my ribs like snaps, where chicken pox picked to leave a tiny extra pink nipple, I am also a place. A place that changes. I am what happened in a place (that changes too): a blade line bisecting my fingerprint like a slash through my police record, the abrasion on my knee that didn’t heal right in the tropical swelter, stitches under my chin where I got dropped and in the plump of my lips – gravity – my own choice of a black star needled under my skin and a sincere smile dimmed by nicotine.
* * *
And who touched her who touched? Who led her into the coatroom and revealed his pinkest member? Who showed her how to play Mick and Bianca as two girls? Who kissed her nipples in the VW van? Who slid a hand past her gasp? Who looked and loved her ass-end, down-hanging, chap-lipped, as body and beating breath, as envelope and stalk? Who showed her the world is peopled with other bodies? And who was she, fondled, who slapped, who spread out on the ground as the softer layer of earth, who was she discovered by touch and becoming, who the me who, who the she who?
* * *
The sum of the girlbody, selfbody: the quiddity and the corpus hanging off two ends of a broken branch with the rough break (bright
wood, inside out, grained like sinew) as a fulcrum -- can you see it? The girl as parts,
a balance cantilevered on the beginning of a gap, held by what holds, what would be judged.
On one end what she is, wishboned by what she does or did, always a decision forming, (this from
this or to this, not one whole) always, even in increase, a part of herself moving out.
* * *
But why should death be the end? (because it is not to what is) Does beauty elope in the arms of youth? (the room will never again be cleft in two by my entrance) Flesh loosens its hold on the bone that kept it to the line of a vital mathematics. Invisibility frees its grey and fade. Exhaustion prepares for sleep. DNA’s immortal code is neither, and one raised to likeness moves to the other coast.
* * *
Never mind, my baby, body has its own call. Fragile, mortal, its thirst. Death is the body’s birthright. Here, drink from my breast which fills and droops to your mouth. Gladly will I give myself to your newer claim to be.
P
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