Fleshly Answers

Doomed beauties, my companions, my familiars, your long arms braceleted with snakes of danger, a questions twines in all the undergrowth. How can we tell the living from the dead? Puvis de Chavanne’s tall pearly figures dressed as sturdy Spartans at the chase turn out to be pale paper dolls in space. And how can we be sure that we’re alive? Our bodies, aging, changing, slow and stiffen. On flesh if not yet quite inert increasingly opaque, bite or bruise or blemish pose the questions Where have you been? What have you been doing? My sister’s leg, scaled by a manic cat nearly three years ago, still is scored and punctured. Last September I picked blackberries bare-armed; here are the scratches ten weeks later. We are passing through the world. This is some of what it does to us.