Thread: Your Jacket at a Distance

Your Jacket at a Distance

Ocean breathing on me at night while crabs shift
my knees, nest in my skin like gemstones,
once so I had skin, once so I wasn’t lonely. I’m sifting sea-
weed between my wilted teeth, the heartbeat of your tongue resting
where you said I wasn’t a moon at all, or anything you could see
from a planet, or even

just a beach.
I wrote your name where it could be washed away,
then never finished.

I hate the way trees die here, drooling, wafting,
crisp enough to terrify my fingers, striking enough that
I wouldn’t touch them anyway. Wearing wind like you would
if I were a moon fertilized
in the Armageddon, if waves hissed and rode my body,
gulping every claw or wail with the breath
of a thousand dying corals.

I bellowed yesterday
because I was pinched,
unremarkably bathing in sand and light and your tongue.

The slither of a petrified tear jumping from the moon
into my hair, while I only think of lapping the salt glaze from my face,
because you told me once to draw a circle with the tide,
sing to the island, sing and palm skeletal shells,
so I wasn’t remote anymore, or even

just a beach.
I wrote your name where it could be washed away,
then never finished.

Well, you are amazing as always, Bay.

I can’t decide if I like the repetition of the second and sixth stanzas or not. I’m leaning toward not. I sort of think that the repetition lessens the impact of the ending of the poem. I think it would work better if you kept the sixth stanza as is, because it’s a beautiful ending, and then rewrote the second stanza so that, at the very least, the last two lines of it are entirely different. My reasoning is that the last stanza serves as a sort of “anchor” for the poem, because it’s the most concrete image you’ve got here. I think having such an image earlier in the poem, however, interrupts the flow a little bit.

Overall, though, I can’t find much fault with this. I think that the juxtaposition of the warm, beachy imagery contrasts very well with the overall feeling of loneliness and isolation. Yet it also makes perfect sense; the speaker is characterizing herself in terms, I think, of a tropical island: beautiful and warm, yet isolated and remote. However, the beauty is somewhat hidden; you didn’t go for the obvious (and therefore more pedestrian), but opted instead for the mysterious and strange, which can have a beauty of its own, as it does here.

So, yeah. I like this a lot. Thanks for sharing.