Kate Sweeney

These are private words addressed to you in public

Why is the measure of love, loss?
It hasn’t rained in three months.
                        ­­–from Written on the Body by Jeannette Winterson

For a short while, I could forgive the grainy recording
of our voices. Whispers jammed into tiny wires, wires
tucked away in the long-lag of distance. What I accept as
your voice. A howl. Backlit cicada’s singing. An imagined dog
roped to a fence, barking. I’ve become obsessed with the
amount of time it takes a grain of wheat to find its way
from ground to mouth. I’m hungry. I pretend to forget you
over time. I continue to eat.

There are years when the rhythm of body is everything,
brief moments worshiping the slow stretch of thigh.
The acute pain of an exposed nipple, a blurry image
in glass, mistakes. I don’t know why the velocity
of engorgement is testimony to some sort of heroic
hydration. I do know when you run your cock
against my cheek I ache to take you in. No one
explained this part. You never told me how
you learned to smell me from across a crowded room.

I’ve stopped wearing perfume.

How easily intention is tamped down
in damp shadows of promise.
The smallest movements of sound
prove out hope: a horizon teeming with
yellow-tailed hawks, a rotting pile of sycamore
branches in the yard, a drought.

We are afraid of decay.
We grow old. I wait. I plant herbs
instead of flowers, sweeping the dust
so it doesn’t gather. Words like:
longevity, or continuity. How far we’ve
come moving toward instead of away.
We abide in the natural order of things—
A celestial pattern confused for fact,
the not so subtle counting of moons.
The time it takes trauma to manifest
in our children’s children.

There’s a certain magnetism in the skate sacs hatching at sunset,
Dead, low water mixing with the sharp shadow of a body.

Note: The poem’s title is taken from T.S. Eliot’s A Dedication to my Wife

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Kate Sweeney has poems in Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, SWWIMM Everyday, and Adanna Literary Journal, with poems forthcoming from Ethel Zine. She is Marketing Director for The Adroit Journal and currently resides in Los Angeles where she is a political marketing executive.