I read somewhere that pleasure is an accurate measure of freedom
so when I smile in a way that means two please
or wear sandals knowing I will be walking through fields of mud
in the rain, or when I let a near stranger run & run his fingers through my hair,
I am trying to get free.
I am trying to be the dress I wear in the wind,
how it opens like a hand stretching up after an afternoon nap,
or I am trying to be the wind
& how it shuts the pages of my book
and brings the smell of spring closer.
Sometimes I think I must be beyond the age
of surprising myself
but then I tie my hair back
& I re-read your letters
& am not moved.
I open the window,
wake up on my spine instead of my belly,
get a new song stuck in my head
& see how I am most myself
when I am least myself
like how snow becomes visible to me only
when it’s disappearing.
The body, I am trying to say,
is a season between seasons,
the denouement not the apex,
the pleasure of a walk home in the dark
so much more than the party it is leaving.
By which I mean:
I was never yours up there
in the sudden tragedy of the destination, the end, the peak.
I mean you never turned the faucet just a little bit warmer
while I was washing my hands,
or kissed my neck from behind or turned the song up
right where it needed to be turned up.
It was either everything or nothing & mostly
it was nothing.
I was nineteen when you asked me to marry you the first time
& somewhere down in the valley
was my real body
in a downpour
getting free.