dorothy neagle
All the Things They Say About Water
they say it always returns, seeks its origin.
they say it is death, but also a place to live, if you have gills, if
you are a mermaid, which I am, of course.
or I don’t know if I am – how do you know?
they say in the first phase of the moon,
when the moon is new, the water rises up from the ground.
they say it always finds a way in, every hole, any error
or mistake – everything we miss.
they say it won’t care how it crushes you, as strong as it appears serene
deceiving in its dependable curling mathematical habits.
they say the moon pulls the water in and away. they say
most of the body is water – it makes us up
and in it we will pucker and disintegrate, which is why I like it
even though it scares me, why I feel
when I face it like I’m standing in a shelter with one wall
blown open to the grave.
they say if you drink saltwater, you’ll die of thirst, like my mother,
who was also the moon
the yellow-white block of salt I held in my mouth all night
and woke up bloated, knowing
once and for all how the beautiful burying wave conceals the crimes of which it’s capable.
The Man with the Disappearing Eyes and Mouth
1.
I say, What are you doing in this picture, Dad?
because I don’t know how to say, What did it feel like to leave us?
He looks for a second at himself,
crouched at the edge of the gravel driveway in the grass,
stirring the hidden contents of a tall, enameled pot.
The knees of his pants are worn in circles
and he is folded like laundry over
the tops of his round toed work boots
with the brown and yellow laces.
My brother sits beside him with a smudged face
the slash of Dad’s outstretched arm like a sash
across his small chest. This man, he says,
pointing to the third person in the photo,
was teaching us how to make soap.
And the rest is silence – our shared history
of quiet. I know the rest but can’t remember
what our house felt like when he still lived there.
2.
The photo is really a painting.
Compositional. Heads and straw hats.
Nesting dolls of my brother and the
the soap man. Behind them,
green and gold, the frame
of a hoop house, leaves
draping the house in shade.
Between his beard and moustache,
my father’s smiling lips. And
the boots so worn his feet are
slouched on one edge of each sole,
so if you unlaced them, they would
fall away, no bones.
3.
I am sitting in the grass beside him.
I am somewhere out of frame.
I am in his body, his blood in mine.
The shape of my arms reaching out, long.
His thumbnail white against the brown palm.
Already, in photographs, my father
is a different person – I don’t mean
a younger version of himself. I mean
something more lost than that,
but not so lost that his body is gone.
4.
He will say he was happier then –
more happy than at any other time. Maybe
it was Mom’s choice to shoot him
that way, candid, his face always turning
away. But if the past
is going to move
into the future, as it must –
if the points between this photograph
and now can come together
in a circle – he is going to have to leave.
He is going to have to empty out the suitcase
of the past in which he sat and walked and
worked and slept. I see him
in the photographs. In some he holds me
In some he smiles directly at the camera.
Mostly he looks away.
Born and raised in Kentucky, Dorothy Neagle has studied writing most recently at the Unterberg Poetry Center and at the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. Her poetry has appeared in The Write Launch, and her nonfiction in The Nasiona, Mythos Magazine and the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. She lives and writes in Hastings on Hudson, New York, and is currently at work on a memoir and a collection of poetry. You can find her on instagram @sentencesaremyfave.
© 2020
