And not this time the body of my child,
but my own skin, loving the wrinkled knees
and the scars dealt the child I was,
loving the skin between toes,
how soft, verily soft,
like the tenderness
behind the knees.
How could I have so disliked this body
in my life, the one water so laves
in the small tub of my own storm’s tides.
Just like the other women I know,
the girls, so interrupted by our own proportions
to the world of ought.
I look at the picture of my grandmother;
never was there a lapse of my love
for the fit of her flesh
upon her sweetness, about her kindness.
And great-grandmother, no teeth but a smile,
she sits on the stump of a once large tree,
or we think that enthrones her wide hips,
tobacco-chewing, pipe-smoking, tobacco-sniffing women,
all these, and my great-great-grandmother,
the picture from a newspaper all I have of her
except something inside me that is what she is.
She looks so stern, and maybe it is the photo,
or maybe, god forbid, that is also a part of me,
but I like her dark, darkness, the bone earrings,
hair pulled straight and black.
Did they feel about themselves
as women today or did they merely think
I have grown
or I have grown old?
Never will I not love again
this skin which is each of those women.
Never will I not bathe slowly, washing
my elbows, that dent beneath my arm,
the cleft between legs,
the belly still so gently soft,
all the skin so once tight
loosening now
as if there is more, even more,
so much more life,
more love, to live inside
this beauty I have become
made flesh,
warmer now than water.
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