The Body
has its little hobbies. The lung
likes its air best after supper,
goes deeper there to trade up
for oxygen, give everything else
away. (And before supper, yes,
during too, but there’s
something about evening, that
slow breath of the day noticed: oh good,
still coming, still going … ) As for
bones—femur, spine,
the tribe of them in there—they harden
with use. The body would like
a small mile or two. Thank you.
It would like it on a bike
or a run. Or in the water. Blue.
And food. A habit that involves
a larger circumference where a garden’s
involved, beer is brewed, cows
wake the farmer with their fullness,
a field surrenders its wheat, and wheat
understands I will be crushed
into flour and starry-dust
the whole room, the baker
sweating, opening a window
to acknowledge such remarkable
confetti. And the brain,
locked in its strange
dual citizenship, idles there in the body,
neatly terraced and landscaped.
Or left to ruin, such a brain,
wild roses growing
next to the sea. The body is
gracious about that. Oh, their
scent sometimes. Their
tangle. In truth, in secret,
the first thing
in morning the eye longs to see.
—Marianne Boruch
Lately the body is all I can think about, and so I’m drawn to poems that celebrate its beauty and complexity, its strength and wonder. The metaphorical body is ultimately tied to the reality of a heart pumping blood and a lung that “goes deeper there to trade up/for oxygen”—and it satisfies me in a very visceral way. This poem tells me to listen to my body, to listen to its desires and needs: “The body would like/a small mile or two. Thank you.” Who am I to argue?
Marianne Boruch is fantastic in person—big voice, big heart—and this translates well into her poems. Read them, and go see her read them herself if you can.
-R
