29 June 2008 | Vol. 8, No. 2

You loved a woman once

by KEETJE KUIPERS

She told you of childhood summers, mayflies trembling

beside the bridge of her nose, hunting frogs. Skinning them

on a brick, the house smelling like their small, fried legs.

All she wanted was for you to carry her home in a canoe

with paddles, life vests, a flare. You promised

to teach her how to swim when she was in your arms.

Your own body, broken into so many times, became a clear lake

for her to bathe in. Remember pulling the one tiny, suckering

leech from below her neck, the pale collarbone Braille it left.

You said the boat was her shoulder in your mouth, even when

you couldn't bear her epaulets of freckles, even when nothing

but a body would do and there was no body but her own.

Below her—lily pads, dragonflies, the worms

dug up last summer and thrown from the dock to see fish

rise in a boil—now all snapped raw in the frozen pond. And speaker,

coded "you"—what about the light straining through her dampened

hair, will you catch it in your jaws? There's the smell of paper

on her skin and you pressing her body like a flower in a book.