This poem is dedicated to anyone who has ever felt completely disoriented by a widening gap between themselves and their partner. I see you, beloved. You haven’t lost your pull. Sometimes we are just meant to spin into a new orbit, to see some new stars, and to remember that we are the ones that create and sustain our own gravity— but only always.
Kendall
Slack Tide
I’ve seen Rufus Wainwright perform
Leonard Cohen’s famous song on a
starlit stage—I felt the grip of holy
shivers at the base of my scalp, the
shock of tears in my septum, one
ghostlike hand cradling my head,
the other pinching my nostrils shut,
dipping me backwards and baptizing
me in gooseflesh, a cold and broken
hallelujah escaping from the parted lips
of my heart in a single, rapturous bubble.
Still, that didn’t compare to the first time
you traced your finger from my sternum
to my navel, the waves of longing and
satisfaction that came in and out
on the tides of my skin, the astonishment
I felt at the way your body did my bidding
without a single word exchanged
between us, just exactly like the sea
bending its wild ear to the moon,
rising and falling in the expansive,
insignificant space between them.
We have spun around the sun seventeen
dizzying times since that first touch,
and I wonder why you no longer respond
to my gravity. Why the sea has become
placid, why it is so still upon the sand,
stuck in the doldrums, even as I shine
bright as summer rain. Do I lack the pull
I used to have, or are you just incapable
of being moved? When I look for you, all
I see are thick, formless clouds obscuring
all the blue from my ever-distant view.
Now my finger traces the tideline of my
once baptized shore and I imagine it’s you,
or a hummingbird with her tongue deep
in honeysuckle, or a snake burrowing into
the sun-warmed sand, but I cannot taste
the flower’s sweet nectar and I cannot nestle
into earth’s dark womb, I can only touch
the place where you used to be while you
sleep in the other room, reassuring myself
that death always begets new life, even if
we’re in another orbit when it blooms.
Kendall! Your beautiful language pierced my heart. My husband and I have been married for 19 years, and I am still struggling to find the words to describe the distance between us and whatever we've become. The way you used water as metaphor here - first for baptism, then for love - spoke strongly to my own situation. Thank you for sharing your gift. You really are an incredibly talented poet, and I admire that gift because I am not a natural poet at all. I will say I hope you are submitting your work to journals!
So beautiful Kendall. I listened to it the first time, and the AI voice was hilarious in the breaks, I decided to read the poem myself and it was a much better experience. I would love for you to read it, with your voice. Something to think no about, perhaps, with future poems.