Shaping Your Body Poem by julia kolchinsky dasbach

These are not the parts and poems of the Body only… "I Sing the Body Electric," Walt Whitman

Take history, this moment, study it
through webs of skin
that link us
bone to bone and silence us
away from body.

The heart worn
inside out, the lip,
a clef that won't make music,
the bone,
return to it again, and find it
unconcealed,
find it white and broken and
not yours.

I. the drop and tympan of the ears
is silent is autumn
leaf-flesh
is the growing and the root
the part of you
most different from myself
is all the color
of a season you can't shed
is being born(e)
is music heard inside
but echoed
out of salt and water
and the belly.


II. waking or sleeping of the lids
give us dream-language.
i wanted to hear, you said,

the Milky Way in winter, your voice,
floating by us, slow
and blended, I wanted to say,

the forgotten part of dust, goodbye.
I knew you kept it, i'm sorry,
an extra vessel, black and slowing,

i've thought this through, your rhythm,
I even knew just where,
i'm too tired, across the edge of a word

I can't repeat, you're better off
without me, its sibilance wound
winding my wrists to yours.

i am sorry, you sounded out, sounded
out of body and of sleep.
I begged or maybe prayed

that you would wait,
wait out the night, i'll try,
and in the morning, i will,

I came and kissed them
your waking
or sleeping lids.


III. Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth
are out of order. We don't kiss

this way. And the breath?
That too is missing.


IV. The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud
: It's easy to love you,
My answer: but it's hard
to be in love. How naïve then
to place all that weight
on difficulty. How young.
And years from now,
I'll hear your slow steps
struggle up the stairs
to bring me water.
I'll measure time
by their approach.


V. neck-slue

The head hidden
behind its iridescent
watercolor spill
and soft white feathers
breathe against the wind
or chill or I imagine
they're still breathing
because there is no blood
no sign of struggle
no joy in it
this gaze at wings
unbroken, or the pink
and childlike claws
stretched out
as if to catch a secret
they once carried.
No joy in it, I must repeat:
no beauty that's not stolen.
And so, for days I watched it
stay against the pavement,
a dead pigeon, its neck
bathed in bone-white slues
of unbroken sunlight.


VI. and the partition
I cannot find it.
That hidden place
you never had a need to hide.
Show me, my love,

that imaginary horizon
where your body
ends
where mine
ceases to begin.


VII. the ample side-round of the chest
the glute and thigh, cheek and cheeks and
paper? love—
we don't write letters anymore.
so what will they find
of us? these words?
how ample: a pay stub, the trace of voice,
your worn carpenter's glove, some sunken
places where we wrote each other
in voiceless, bodied language.
And then that blot, browning
the shape of an eye
you can no longer tell
was blood once, was yours—
an ink
you spilled too sparingly or not
sparingly enough.


VIII. Ribs, belly, back-bone
clocks
without the hands
to tell the time
your body has remaining,
and you have lost
the right to want

to end it all, no right to take
what is already being taken—
that pulse and ring and tone
inside your ear—your skull
a drum of wooden bone that cracks
and counts the cracking, measures

just how deep
to burrow past the flesh
before the marrow's reached
and you
are nothing more
than sundial,
blank and waiting
for a shadow to be cast


IX. all the belongings of my or your body
let's hold them in the way of water
cupped and risen slip-spilling
from my hands to yours


X. The circling rivers
tell this story—ours:
if Prometheus stole breath
instead of fire,
he would have taken yours

and in exchange, he'd feed you
cooling, risen wind-light,
and lift
on your sweet air, your

body bound
onto his own,
as gift, as last
redemption—