Poem: A Lover's Recourse (to be engulfed)

A Lover’s Recourse
“. . . the body’s gesture caught in action, and not contemplated in repose: the body of athletes, orators, statues: what in the straining body can be immobilized.” –Roland Barthes


s’abîmer / to be engulfed

Take heart and sing of love's recourse, the river
running from the river and still is the river.

A kiss in my bedroom and a kiss at the door.
The only French I speak: be swallowed by the river.

The cloudy pigeon, mutant dove, aches through the air,
nowhere safe to land, save the branches of the river.

You could not touch the other bank and so you thought,
a lake! It was never a lake. It was a river.

In the dark, flesh locates flesh with unerring instinct,
and fills in what it traced, the breathing map, the river.

Dragging for months his body for more than a body,
I hauled up a word—need, or was it, feet—from the river.

Someone advised Jee once to write what makes him sad.
She saw all his life standing waist-deep in the river.

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