Geography of the Flesh

The map is creased by now
frayed at the edges, worn soft
at the mountains and the sea,
where it’s been folded time and time again.
This happens slowly it seems:
the shaping—
the way each region blurs at its borders,
bleeds into the landscape of the next,
re-draws the topography, line by curved line.
North weaves the mulched reds and browns
of her autumn into your hair,
wet-tipped cedars and firs urgent in their growth
locking branches and roots together,
Gilding their shed pages against every strand.
Western valleys rim the body’s fertile folds,
Oaks lining creeks and watersheds
All along the fault-line of your hips,
Rocking and shuddering in quake after quake after quake.
Ghosts with scarred feet haunt the southern tributaries,
summer veins pulsing sweat through ribbed red-rock canyons
that hot dry wind urging lungs open,
aspens whispering flickering yellow in the night sky.
Nothing is finished in this place:
silted stone waits to be carved
by an eastern wind’s calloused hands;
waves pray at the littered shores
each tide revealing a new layer from the dark deep
of rusted tin, seaweed, softened bits of glass—
the wrinkled pages of once-new skins
pulled taut by another round of rain.
You pause here a moment,
hungry at the cusp of seasons
and feel the hull of your torso
perpetually lifting, in arched anticipation
where a desert wren huddles inside,
resting in its nest of bones
wings poised to draw up and open.

--Brook Casey, Summer, 2004