visitation     

So here you are again, Jennifer, all bells and makeup, virago in your small bronze way. With flowers and chocolates, your wide strong smile and painted lips. I expected you to return vindictive and full of wrath, but here you are, soft-eyed and smiling, your face smooth and dry as bone.

I remember clearly the days at the library, the days of wandering and spending food stamps on ice cream and cheesecake, the look of us pressed together naked in front of the bathroom mirror. I remember you naked, the hard hammered curves. You were built like a fighter. You were the first woman I knew who rejected ownership of the body, who believed that a woman was holy simply because she was a woman.

And now here you are, cut and hammered as ever, ageless, joking about men and women you've loved and who've loved you. The slope of your lower back, the tattoos, the sound of my name in your mouth. I don't know why you are here in this strange form, a force more than a body, the two of us joining like points of velocity more so than agents of flesh. I know you are alive and far from me, comfortable in Minneapolis. The life of galleries and performance art, the Walker Art Museum, the Guthrie Theatre. The perpetual greenhouse with its bitter orange trees, where once we curled together in the heat and looked outside at the long tracts of snow. I know you are there, older, coiled in your skin as I am bundled in mine.

And yet, here you are. Ghostly, potently vocal, begging your name out of my throat. You're the worrying of a bad tooth, a finger in an open wound. You're poetry, blood, salt, soil.

What are you doing here?

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